Configuring backup and restore

Configure IBM® Cloud Pak for Network Automation to back up and restore your orchestration data and application logging data.

Your orchestration data is stored in a cloud-native PostgreSQL database. You can back up and restore your assemblies, resource packages, VNF packages, and other orchestration data. You can also back up your application logging data. The application logging date is stored in OpenSearch and includes microservice logs and the messages that are exchanged between resource drivers and underlying systems. The backups are full backups and are stored in S3-compatible object storage.

The backup and restore functions are available from an Orchestration Backups custom resource (CR) definition. To configure the backup and restore functions, you must first set up the S3 storage. Then, you specify details of the S3 storage for the backups. You can also specify other details like whether to use compression and encryption.

Before you can back up data, you must have access to an S3-compatible object storage service and the S3 bucket in which to store the backup data.

After backups are created, you can use them to restore the backup data and recover a IBM Cloud Pak for Network Automation instance in the OpenShift® cluster.

In IBM Cloud Pak for Network Automation, write-ahead log (WAL) archiving occurs in the PostgreSQL cluster every 5 minutes. That means that you can restore orchestration data from 5 minutes ago. This time period is suitable for most use cases, but if you need to change it, you can change the value of the archive_timeout setting in the PostgreSQL configuration.

WAL archiving occurs for orchestration data only, not for application logging data.