Maintenance Activity
The maintenance activity defines the actual maintenance actions to perform, for example - perform Secure Backup on device X.
It will also contain other specific definitions for the action, like which certificate to use for the Secure Backup or which deployment policy to use for a configuration sync operation.
Maintenance Plans
A maintenance activity such as backup or sync is defined inside a plan - backup plan or sync plan - a plan cannot contain two types of activities.
A plan contains common definitions for all the activities it contains - such as the scheduling definition, email and syslog addresses to report to and so on.
A plan cannot be enabled if it does not contain at least one activity
Maintenance Task
A maintenance task is the execution of the operation on the device - for example, a secure backup activity on devices QA1 and QA2 will execute two backup tasks, one for each device.
Using Patterns for Device and Domain Names
Whenever device or domain patterns are allowed - for example, when choosing the which devices or domains to backup - use an asterisk to designate a pattern or a comma to list values
Here are some valid examples when choosing a device:
Prod* - asterisk at the end - all devices starting with "Prod"
*1 - asterisk in the beginning - all devices ending with "1"
Device_QA_*1 - asterisk in the middle
Device*QA* - two asterisks
Device-QA1, Device-QA2, Device-*3 - a list of values with or without asterisks
*- only an asterisk, this will select all devices configured in DPOD
Maintenance Window
The maintenance window defines the range of hours where maintenance plans are allowed to run.
It consists of two parameters in 24h format (e.g. 22:00) - maintenance window start time and maintenance window end time.
You can define the window for each plan separately, or use a system value defined in the system parameters
Plans will not execute outside the maintenance window,
If some of the plan's tasks were still waiting to execute when the maintenance window time ended, all waiting tasks will be canceled and the plan execution will end.
Error Policy
The error policy controls what happen when a task failed (either validation or during execution)
When the error policy is "Halt" - all waiting tasks will be canceled and will not execute.
When the error policy is "Ignore" - other tasks will continue to execute as normal.
How to Run Maintenance Plans
There are three ways to run a maintenance plan, for all three ways, the plan must be first enabled:
- Scheduled run - enter a value in the plan's schedule field, the format is identical to the one that is used for scheduling a report
- Via REST API - Check the Maintenance REST API page for more details, the API Reference is mentioned in the plan definiton
- Ad-hoc - clicking "Execute" on the Plan Details Page