Hello @anon37102731,
Thanks for reaching out to me. the issue resolved by itself. It was an issue with the istio mesh that is installed on the cluster. the version 1.6.0 has a severe bug that prevent any connection from a running pod to an external system such as a DB or another API 
Once the istio team sent me the work around for another pod, the forest admin pod started to work on its own. It there is one thing we could correct on forest is the error message from forest. So the scenario to reproduce this would be I guess:
Run the forest background pod without any external connection and you will get thet missing forest secret variable message following by a series of http connection /forest with result 204.
thanks for the help,
Regards,
Alex.