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Ongoing platform maintenance

Daily maintenance checklist

The tasks on this checklist should be performed each day.

PR as you go

If you see a way to make this checklist better, just submit a PR to the cg-site repo for content/docs/ops/maintenance-list.md

Review and respond to alerts

  • Review all alerts on Prometheus (requires the VPN).
  • Review all production smoke tests to ensure they are passing.

Investigate open alerts

  • Use our guides for reviewing cloud.gov alerts (prometheus for alert descriptions, links to the relevant rules, and starting points for reviewing each type of alert.
  • Was the alert caused by known maintenance or testing in dev environments? Check with other members of the cloud.gov team if you can’t determine the source.
  • Is this a recurring alert? Search alert history to determine how frequently it is occuring and what event may have started its firing.
  • Should the underlying condition have caused an alert? Alerts should only be raised when they’re something we need to remediate.

Is the alert a real issue?

If the alert may indicate a security issue follow the Security Incident Response Guide , otherwise work to remediate its cause.

Is the alert a false-positive?

If the alert can be tuned to reduce the number of false-positives with less than two hours of 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 open support requests

Review the “new” (yellow) and “open” (red) Zendesk tickets. First-tier support (customer squad) 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.

See also: Detailed guidance on working with our support tools.

Support rotation

Review the detailed guide on customer support.

Weekly support tasks

Review expiring certificates

You can view a consolidated list of all expiring certificates on the Doomsday Dashboard (requires the VPN). Make note of any that are expiring within two weeks, make sure the team is aware, and plan with the team to determine who will renew the expiring certificate(s) and when.

You can also view this information in each of our four environments, tooling, development, staging, and production, by running doomsday dashboard on the command line.

Ensure all VMs are running the current stemcell

  • Lookup the most recent published stemcell version at: https://bosh.cloudfoundry.org/stemcells/

  • From the jumpbox in each of our four environments, tooling, development, staging and production, run bosh deployments and verify the stemcell in use for each deployment is current. For example, the 621.61 stemcell is outdated below:

    root@Tooling:/tmp/build/8e72821d$ bosh deployments | grep go_agent
concourse-production    awslogs-xenial/14       bosh-aws-xen-hvm-ubuntu-xenial-go_agent/621.64  -
concourse-staging       awslogs-xenial/14       bosh-aws-xen-hvm-ubuntu-xenial-go_agent/621.64  -
developmentbosh         awslogs-xenial/14       bosh-aws-xen-hvm-ubuntu-xenial-go_agent/621.64  -
doomsday                awslogs-xenial/14       bosh-aws-xen-hvm-ubuntu-xenial-go_agent/621.64  -
nessus-manager-prod     awslogs-xenial/14       bosh-aws-xen-hvm-ubuntu-xenial-go_agent/621.64  -
opsuaa                  awslogs-xenial/14       bosh-aws-xen-hvm-ubuntu-xenial-go_agent/621.64  -
postfix-production      awslogs-xenial/14       bosh-aws-xen-hvm-ubuntu-xenial-go_agent/621.61  -
                        bosh-dns/1.20.0         bosh-aws-xen-hvm-ubuntu-xenial-go_agent/621.64
productionbosh          awslogs-xenial/14       bosh-aws-xen-hvm-ubuntu-xenial-go_agent/621.64  -
prometheus-production   awslogs-xenial/14       bosh-aws-xen-hvm-ubuntu-xenial-go_agent/621.64  -
prometheus-staging      awslogs-xenial/14       bosh-aws-xen-hvm-ubuntu-xenial-go_agent/621.64  -
stagingbosh             awslogs-xenial/14       bosh-aws-xen-hvm-ubuntu-xenial-go_agent/621.64  -

  • When the stemcells are out-of-date:

    • Trigger the appropriate deploy-... jobs in Concourse
      • Triggering more than X jobs simultaneously is not advised in case any issues arise during the deployment or if you’re interrupted. X being a number you’re comfortable with monitoring which can vary based on experience or confidence in the deployment. If you’re not sure, ‘3’ is a good starting point.
      • Nessus warning: Before deploying an update that will recreate the Nessus VM, such as updating the stemcell or VM type, be aware that we need to ensure a 10 day waiting period between Nessus VM stemcell upgrades. This is because the Nessus manager deployment requires that the System Owner reset the license key after a stemcell upgrade, and the license key can only be reset every 10 days. Coordinate with the System Owner to ensure the key is ready to be reset before deploying an update that will upgrade the stemcell. You should also read the Troubleshooting Nessus runbook.

Review AWS CloudTrail events

Easy way

Run cloud-trail-check.sh for each AWS account we own, and review the output

Hard way

Get familiar with the documentation for CloudTrail logs.

Use the AWS Console to review API activity history for the EventNames listed below. Or, use the AWS CLI with the appropriate $event_name, and parse the emitted JSON:

aws cloudtrail lookup-events --lookup-attributes AttributeKey=EventName,AttributeValue=$event_name

These EventNames should be attributed to human individuals on the cloud.gov team:

  • ConsoleLogin

All human-generated events should be mapped to named users, e.g. firstname.lastname, and NOT to Administrator. Discuss the event(s) with the indicated cloud.gov operator(s)

All events in the following EventNames should be attributed to Terraform:

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

Terraform runs on instances that use instance profile roles, so authorized events will include:

  • a user name like i-17deadbeef1234567
  • a source IP address within AWS.
  • an AWS access key starting with ASIA

If you observe any non-Terraform activity, discuss the event(s) with the indicated cloud.gov operator(s) (see above)

If you’re unable to ascertain an event was authorized, 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 potential improvements in CloudCheckr

Review the Best Practices report in CloudCheckr and try to fix something near the top.

Pay extra attention to any notices that indicate we are approaching a limit on resources so that we can reach out to AWS to ask for a quota increase before the limit is hit. This will help prevent future sudden outages.

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