BUG: GA4 Certificate Errors

[mchlwellman]

Description

The POST to the Google Analytics endpoint fails, often but not always, with this error message -

requests.exceptions.SSLError: HTTPSConnectionPool(host='www.google-analytics.com', port=443): Max retries exceeded with url: /mp/collect?measurement_id=<redacted>&api_secret=<redacted> (Caused by SSLError(SSLCertVerificationError(1, '[SSL: CERTIFICATE_VERIFY_FAILED] certificate verify failed: certificate signature failure (_ssl.c:1007)')))

This is the POST that we make when the GA4 pixel is loaded in an email. Datadog shows this starting on 11/21 -

Research will need to be done into why the errors are occurring, and the remedy. Perhaps a Google certificate is needed, or a specific cipher.

• Ticket is understood, and QA has been contacted (if the ticket has a QA label).
• This work is added to the sprint review slide deck (key win bullet point and demo slide)

Steps to Reproduce

There isn't a repeatable way of reproducing this at the moment. The issue has been observed in dev, and staging (as well as prod, of course).

This is a sporadic issue, and there is no workaround, presently.

Impact/Urgency

In the past month there have been 8.45k occurrences of this error. In the same timeframe there have been ~2.1 million successful calls to the GA4 endpoint. I think the impact is low.

Expected Behavior

• No Certificate errors occur when posting metrics to the GA4 endpoint.

QA Considerations

• Until we know the steps to reproduce it will be difficult to come up with a testing strategy. During the research phase, when the problem is understood the developer should reach out and advise QA of possible test steps.

Additional Info & Resources

• Datadog logs
• GA4 email_open page