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MOVEit maintenance and housekeeping

Technical top tips for MOVEit MFT

Keeping your MOVEit system in a tidy state is critical to its performance and the security it provides. Pro2col technicians can perform in-depth health checks for you, but there are some basic things that you can (and should) do to keep your system in tip-top condition. This top tip makes recommendations for both MOVEit Transfer and MOVEit Automation to keep the system running efficiently.

MOVEit Transfer

User settings

Users will remain in your system until they have been deleted and all references to them removed. You should opt to automatically delete expired users quickly. I generally recommend seven days after expiry, in order to catch any accidental expirations while not leaving users available for any more time than is necessary.

And on that note, you should check the expiration settings on your system. You can assign different expiration policies to each class of user to determine the conditions under which a user account becomes expired. It makes sense to have a more stringent policy for temporary users than you would have for regular users.

Another thing to consider is to disable logging of successful signon/signoff for users who make frequent connections (for example batch accounts). This will remove some unnecessary log records and decrease the database activity.

Reports

Reports are executed either manually or through the overnight batch schedule (unless you do otherwise through the API). They can be very resource intensive to execute and can severely impact the performance of the server. Be careful to only schedule reports that you absolutely need and look at alternative approaches for those reports that clearly have a negative system impact. Ipswitch Analytics is a flexible reporting and monitoring solution that’s worth taking a look at.

Old files

MOVEit Transfer is a file transfer server, not a file storage system. Generate a custom report to look for older files in the system. Set default Automated Maintenance settings at a high level and propagate them through the directory structure if possible. If you have MOVEit Automation as well as Transfer, consider using it to select and delete any file older than six months.

Audit logs

These accumulate over time at a surprising rate in the Archive directory. It is very rare that they are actually used, so it makes sense to periodically move them into another medium, such as a network backup.

Logs table

The logs table accounts for more space in the database than all of the other tables put together. Consider setting the maximum log age to be as low as practicably possible, such as four weeks. You can also suppress successful signon/signoff, as already mentioned. Most importantly however, educate the administrators into always entering a restrictive date when filtering the logs. Again, Ipswitch Analytics can help here.

MOVEit Automation

Legacy failover

If you are using Legacy Failover, be sure to failover to the alternative host on a regular basis. Weekly, for example. Not only does this release any resources the application is holding, but it also displays all of the hosts that the MOVEit application cannot connect to in the log file. Unavailable UNC hosts have a detrimental effect on MOVEit as it tries to connect to each host both at startup and occasionally thereafter in order to validate connectivity.

Advanced tasks and chaining

Don’t overuse Advanced Tasks. If the transfer is a simple one that can be managed with a traditional task, choose this as it will have a lower memory footprint. Conversely, if you find that you have chained several tasks together using ‘Next Actions’, consider if you can instead use an Advanced Task.

Trim old stats

This task comes already installed with all new MOVEit Automation implementations and – after some initial configuration – it generally never gets touched again. It is a great tool to tune the database with though. Set the three DaysToKeep parameters to better control how big you will allow the database to become (How long do you need to keep records of ‘No Transfer’ in the database?). You can save all trimmed data into CSVs somewhere, so no data gets lost. Create a task to run on a monthly basis to zip up all csv files older than a month to save on space.

Resource intensive tasks

There are many reasons why a task uses more resources than expected. Here are a couple of things to look out for:

  • Does the source directory contain a lot of files? I sometimes see directories with 10,000 files, which severely impacts MOVEit when a task tries to list the files.
  • Are you using Sync tasks? These are only really suitable for synchronising single level directories of less than one thousand files.
  • Are you overscheduling tasks? No transfer tasks are common, but if they account for 95% of a tasks activity, maybe schedule the task less frequently.
  • Are your file notifications set too high level? Remember that file notifications will alert MOVEit Automation of any changes to the file system that you may not be interested in. Eg: archive folders.

Advanced health check

Our technicians have extensive knowledge of MOVEit software and can get it performing at optimum efficiency at your organisation. Health checks can be carried out either remotely for individual servers, or on-site for more complex landscapes. Find out more below.

$UID = “Myuser”
$PWD = “Mypass”
$URI = “https://myservername.com/webadmin/api/v1”
$token = “$URI/token”
$list = “$URI/tasks/running”
$stop = “$URI/tasks/scheduler/stop”
$authstring = “grant_type=password&username=$UID&password=$PWD”
$auth = Invoke-RestMethod -Uri $token -Method Post -Body $authstring
$mytoken = $auth.access_token
$headers = @{“Authorization” = “Bearer $mytoken”}
“Stopping Scheduler”
Invoke-RestMethod -Uri $stop -Method Put -Headers $headers
“Checking for running Tasks”
$count = 1
while ($count -gt 0) {
$tasks = Invoke-RestMethod -Uri $list -Method Get -Headers $headers
$count = $tasks.items.length
if ($count -gt 0) {
“$count tasks running, sleeping 10 seconds”
sleep 10
}
}
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