General

What you need to know before deploying ForgeRock products

Last updated Aug 10, 2020

The purpose of this article is to provide advice on the things you need to know before deploying ForgeRock products (AM/OpenAM, DS/OpenDJ, IDM/OpenIDM and IG/OpenIG) to ensure you are adequately prepared and knowledgeable.

Deploying ForgeRock products

You should ensure you are prepared before deploying ForgeRock products to ensure a successful deployment and ongoing use of the products.

Here are some key things you should incorporate into your deployment plans, which are covered in more detail below:

Read all the relevant documentation and KB articles prior to starting your upgrade or install.
Attend training if you are new to a product or upgrading to a new major version.
Create pre-production environments that mirror your production environments.
Monitor your systems constantly.

Read relevant documentation and KB articles

You should pay close attention to the following documents in particular:

Release notes applicable to the version you are planning to upgrade to, or install. You should read through all sections in the release notes to:
- Ensure your environment meets all the minimum requirements, such as Java®, Operating systems, Web application containers, databases etc.
- Understand all the new features and improvements, as well as all the changes that have occurred between the version you are currently using and the version you are upgrading to (this may mean reading multiple sets of release notes).
- Understand and plan migration to new features where functionality is deprecated or removed.
Install and/or Upgrade guides applicable to the version you are planning to upgrade to, or install. This step is very important even if you have used a product before as the install/upgrade instructions may have changed.
KB articles on upgrading or installing. AM includes a Best practice article on upgrading to specific versions.

Useful links

Attend training

Training is essential to help you get the most from a product and is equally important if you are new to the product or upgrading to a new major release.

See ForgeRock University for details of all the training course that are available.

Create pre-production environments

Creating pre-production environments that mirror production (in terms of environment and load) is essential for development and testing purposes to ensure any new deployments or configuration changes work as intended without any unexpected consequences.

The key benefits of this approach are:

You can test any deployments or configuration changes in pre-production environments first. This means:
- You do not affect live users if something goes wrong with a planned change.
- You can debug more easily as you do not have performance considerations when increasing the debug logging mode.
- You can restart servers if needed without scheduling downtime.
You can easily reproduce issues experienced in production environments if you know the base systems are the same.
You can test environmental changes (such as upgrading Java or Apache Tomcat™) to ensure compatibility.
You can test increased load to ensure your system is appropriately tuned to handle it.