Maintenance and Management

Suggested Best Practices for IAP

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

System Operations, Administration and Maintenance

The sections below are organized into daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and bi-annual OAM activities involved with managing and maintaining IAP. 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 IAP 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 IAP as required for Development, Staging, and Production environments.
• Review change logs and release notes (if available) for all systems that are integrated with IAP. 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 IAP 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 IAP (May, December).
• Update the IAP Development environment and perform regression tests. Promote it as needed.
• At a minimum, restart IAP quarterly.
• Review the IAP Production environment. Purge or archive all unneeded and unused Command Templates, Forms, Workflows, etc.

Bi-Annual Activities

• Review the major release notes documentation for IAP (April, August, December).
• Update the IAP Development environment and then regression test it. Promote it as needed