Maintenance Activity

A maintenance activity defines the set of maintenance actions required for a specific goal. An example of such an activity is "Perform Secure Backup on device X".
Additionally, the maintenance activity contains other specific definitions for the action. This may include for instance which certificate should be used for the Secure Backup or which deployment policy should be used for a configuration sync operation.

Maintenance Plan

A maintenance activity such as backup or sync is defined inside a plan, e.g. a backup plan, a sync plan etc. A plan only contains a single type of activities.
A plan contains common definitions for all activities included within it, such as scheduling definition, email and syslog addresses to report to, etc.
A plan must contain at least one activity in order for it to be enabled.

Maintenance Task

A maintenance task is the execution of an operation on a device. An example of a maintenance task would be a secure backup activity on devices QA1 and QA2 which executes two backup tasks - one for each device.

Maintenance Window

A maintenance window defines a period of time during which maintenance plans are allowed to start run.
The definition of a maintenance window consists of two parameters in 24h format (e.g. 22:00)

• Maintenance window start time 
• Maintenance window end time

A maintenance window may be defined separately for each Maintenance Plan. Alternatively, the installation may use a default system value (see Maintenance Configurable Parameters for more information)
Maintenance Plans will not initiate the execution of any new tasks outside the maintenance window.
If, when the Maintenance Window has ended, some of the plan's tasks are still waiting to execute, they will be marked as cancelled and the plan execution will end. Executing tasks will not be interrupted.

Error Policy

The error policy controls what happen when a task fails (during either validation or execution)
When the error policy is "Halt" - all waiting tasks will be cancelled and will not execute. Executing tasks will not be interrupted.
When the error policy is "Ignore" - remaining tasks will continue to execute as normal.

How to Execute Maintenance Plans

There are three methods to execute a maintenance plan.
Note that regardless of the method used, to execute a plan it must first be enabled.

1. Scheduled run: Enter a value in the plan's schedule field. The format is the same as the one used for scheduling a report
2. Via REST API: Consult the Backup REST API or Sync REST API pages for more details
3. Ad-hoc:  By clicking "Execute" on the Plan Details Page
   
   

Using Patterns for Device and Domain Names

Whenever device or domain patterns are allowed within a plan (e.g. when choosing which devices or domains to backup), DPOD accepts an asterisk to designate a pattern, or a comma to list values

Some examples for device selection are listed below: