Maintenance and Management

Suggested Best Practices for Itential Platform

This guide is intended for anyone responsible for administering, managing, and maintaining Itential Platform and covers suggested best practices for system operations, administration, and maintenance (OAM) of Itential Platform on a day-to-day basis through weekly, monthly, quarterly, and bi-annual activities. Please use your Itential Product Support account if you need support or have questions regarding any specific best practices for your environment.

The sections below are organized into daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and bi-annual OAM activities involved with managing and maintaining Itential Platform. Most of these tasks are at the system-level and may be limited to users with administrative privileges.

Daily Activities

Backups

• Backup VMs of all systems.
• At a minimum, backup Mongod, perform mongodump.
• Check Itential Platform connectivity in all environments for connectivity and basic functionality with all externally connected systems. For example: NSO.

Logs

• Review logs and pronghorn.log for any out of the ordinary errors being reported.
• Purge logs as needed.

Weekly Activities

• Review all security related alerts for:

  • Mongo
  • Express
  • Angular, React
  • Node.js
  • Operating System
  • Java Runtime Environment

• Apply updates, as required. First in the Development environment, next in the Staging environment, followed by the Production environment.

• Perform a mongodump of all environments and store data in a secure location.

Monthly Activities

• Review change logs and release notes provided by Itential. Update Itential Platform as required for Development, Staging, and Production environments.
• Review change logs and release notes (if available) for all systems that are integrated with Itential Platform. Look for any API updates or changes that might impact security, connectivity, or functionality.
• Purge and archive (if required) backups from the month before.
• Purge and archive all Itential Platform Development and Staging environments for all unneeded, duplicate items, such as Command Templates, Forms, Workflows, etc.

Quarterly Activities

• Review the major release notes documentation for Itential Platform (Suggested: April, August, December).
• Update the Itential Platform Development environment and perform regression tests. Promote it as needed.
• At a minimum, restart Itential Platform quarterly.
• Review the Itential Platform Production environment. Purge or archive all unneeded and unused Command Templates, Forms, Workflows, etc.

Bi-Annual Activities

• Review the major release notes documentation for Itential Platform (Suggested: May, December).
• Update the Itential Platform Development environment and then regression test it. Promote it as needed