Administration
Administering Cygna Forest Recovery means keeping the people, settings, and agents behind your backups in good order: who can sign in and what they may do, how the Manager and its agents are configured, whether every agent is current and connected, and what the product has recorded about its own activity.
Most administration happens on the screens in the Administration group of the console: Agents, Operators & Roles, Configuration, and License. Monitoring happens on the screens in the Monitoring group: Alerts, Protection Summary, and Audit Trail. Everything on these screens is also available with the cdr command-line tool, except creating, editing, disabling, and resetting operator accounts, which are done in the console.
Who administers what
Cygna Forest Recovery separates administration from backup and recovery. The System Admin role manages operators, configuration, and agents, but it cannot start a backup, change a backup policy, or run a restore. Backup Operators manage backups, and Restore Operators plan and run recoveries. An operator can hold more than one role. For the full table, see Managing Operators and Roles.
Where settings live
The Manager keeps the settings for itself and for every agent in its own database, and pushes agent settings to each agent when they change. Each agent reports back which settings it is running, so the Configuration screen shows both what you set and what is in force. A small number of settings, such as the storage root and the retention floor on the storage machine, are set on the machine itself and shown read-only in the console. See Settings Reference.
Watching the installation
The Manager evaluates its alerts continuously and shows them on the Alerts screen and in the notifications menu in the top bar. It can also email alerts: set recipients in the Alert notifications settings, and each object an alert names is reported when it is raised and when it clears. See Alerts Reference. To feed alerts into your own monitoring, run cdr alert list on a schedule: it exits with code 4 whenever an alert is raised, and --json gives machine-readable output.
Regular checks that keep an installation healthy:
- Alerts—Review raised alerts and act on each one. If alerts are emailed, check that the line on the Alerts screen shows Email on. See Alerts Reference.
- Agents—Check that every agent is connected and that none needs an update. See Maintaining Agents.
- Manager recovery—Check the Manager recovery card on the License screen: the recovery passphrase should be set and the latest database snapshot recent. See Protecting the Manager.
- Audit trail—Review operator activity, especially role changes and recovery actions. See Auditing Operator Activity.
- License—Check the license's end date and renew before it ends. When the license has ended and its grace period is over, or no key is installed, the Manager refuses new backups and recovery operations. See Licensing.
