Ongoing platform maintenance

The platform requires regular support and maintenance activities to remain in a compliant state. If you are on support and you can’t complete any of the items personally, you are responsible for ensuring that an appropriate person does it.

Is it your first day of support?

Update the #cg-platform topic to include your name as the support contact.
Update the support schedule by moving yourself to the end of the list in the slackbot auto response for atlas support schedule.
Join/unmute #cg-support and #cg-platform-news
Meet with the previous support person and take responsibility for any open support items they are still working on.

Daily maintenance checklist

The tasks on this checklist should be performed each day.

Ensure all VMs are running the current stemcell

Get the latest stemcell version from http://bosh.cloudfoundry.org/stemcells/.
Check https://ci.fr.cloud.gov/teams/main/pipelines/aws-light-stemcell-builder to ensure it has built the same version.
On each bosh director run bosh deployments and verify the stemcell in-use for each deployment is current.

Review and respond to open alerts

Review all recent alerts and notifications delivered to cg-notifications and #cg-platform-news.

Are there no alerts or notifications?

Verify the monitoring system is functioning correctly and confirm that alerts are reaching their expected destinations.

Is the alert a real issue?

Remediate it.

Is the alert a false-positive?

If the alert can be tuned to reduce the number of false-positives with less than one day’s work, do it. If more work is required to tune the alert, add a card to capture the work that needs to be done or +1 an existing card if one already exists for tuning the alert.

Be prepared to represent support needs at the next grooming meeting to ensure that cards to fix alerts are prioritized properly.

Review AWS CloudTrail events

Use the AWS Console to review API activity history for the following events:

AuthorizeSecurityGroupEgress
AuthorizeSecurityGroupIngress
ConsoleLogin
CreatePolicy
CreateSecurityGroup
DeleteTrail
ModifyVpcAttribute
PutUserPolicy
PutRolePolicy
RevokeSecurityGroupEgress
RevokeSecurityGroupIngress
UpdateTrail

If any suspicious activity is discovered discuss with appropriate team members and if necessary follow the Security Incident Response Guide.

Review vulnerability and compliance reports

If the reports contain any HIGH items work to remediate them.

Is an update from our IaaS provider required to remediate?

Open a case with the IaaS provider and monitor the case until it has been resolved.

Is a stemcell update required to remediate?

Ask for a date when new stemcells will be delivered in #security in the CF Slack.

Is a bosh release update required to remediate?

Update the bosh release and file a PR for the changes. Once the PR is merged, ensure the updated release is deployed to all required VMs.

Review open support requests

Review the “new” (yellow) and “open” (red) Zendesk tickets. First-tier support (cloud.gov BU) has primary responsibility to do the work of answering these, and you serve as second-tier support providing technical expertise. You’re welcome to reply to the customer with answers if you like (choose “pending” when you submit the answer)*, but your main responsibility is to provide technical diagnoses/advice/details. The easiest way to do that is to write comments on the associated posts in #cg-supportstream. First-tier support may also ask you for pairing time to work out responses together.

People with @gsa.gov emails can’t receive email via Zendesk, so we have to email them via the cloud-gov-support Google Group instead.