Maintenance best practices

This guide covers suggested best practices for system operations, administration, and maintenance (OAM) of Itential Platform on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and bi-annual basis. Contact your Itential Product Support account if you need support or have questions regarding best practices for your environment.

Most of these tasks are at the system level and may be limited to users with administrative privileges.

Daily activities

Backups

• Back up VMs of all systems.
• At a minimum, back up MongoDB using mongodump. See MongoDB backup and recovery.
• Check Itential Platform connectivity in all environments for basic functionality with all externally connected systems (for example, NSO).

Logs

• Review pronghorn.log for any unusual errors.
• Purge logs as needed.

Weekly activities

• Review all security-related alerts for: MongoDB, Express, Angular/React, Node.js, Operating System, and Java Runtime Environment.
• Apply updates as required — first in Development, then Staging, then Production.
• Perform a mongodump of all environments and store data in a secure location. See MongoDB backup and recovery.

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 for all systems integrated with Itential Platform. Look for API updates or changes that might impact security, connectivity, or functionality.
• Purge and archive (if required) backups from the prior month.
• Purge and archive all unneeded or duplicate items (Command Templates, Forms, Workflows, etc.) in Development and Staging environments.

Quarterly activities

• Review major release notes documentation for Itential Platform (suggested: April, August, December).
• Update the Development environment and perform regression tests. Promote as needed.
• Restart Itential Platform at least once quarterly.
• Review the Production environment and purge or archive all unneeded and unused Command Templates, Forms, Workflows, etc.

Bi-annual activities

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