General maintenance and best practices

To ensure that your FortiAnalyzer-BigData appliance runs smoothly, you need to perform regular maintenance tasks and follow best practices guidelines.

Backup and restore to external HDFS

For full instructions on how to backup and restore your data, see Data backup and Data restore.

Schedule maintenance tasks for off-peak hours

Fortinet strongly recommends scheduling maintenance jobs for off-peak hours whenever possible, including jobs such as:

• Storage Pool Backup
• Data Rebalance

Graceful system shutdown

We recommend gracefully shutting down the FortiAnalyzer-BigData services before a planned power outage in order to help prevent data corruption in the stateful workload and conflicts in the distributed consensus.

To gracefully shut down the services:

1. Go to Cluster Manager > Services.
2. From the Actions dropdown, click Stop All Services.

   Wait for the Stop All Services command to finish before powering off the chassis or VM instances.

   

Maintain database integrity

To maintain database integrity, never power off a FortiAnalyzer-BigData unit without a graceful shutdown. Removing power without a proper shutdown can damage FortiAnalyzer-BigData databases.

Before removing power, always use the Stop All Services action from Cluster Manager > Services > Actions, or manually stop services in the following order:

1. Core
2. Message Broker
3. Data Lake
4. Metastore

After you power up your FortiAnalyzer-BigData unit again, you must manually select the Start All Services action from Cluster Manager > Services > Actions and make sure that all hosts, services and health checks are green before resuming system functions.

Fortinet strongly recommends connecting FortiAnalyzer-BigData units to an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) to prevent unexpected power issues that might damage internal databases.