APM V8: APM Server restore.sh requires the same APM HOME path

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The APM Server provides backup.sh and restore.sh scripts to take back up of APM server objects and data and restore it if required. In this post we discuss restriction of APM path on this functionality.

Restriction for backup and restore:

The restore of APM server data generated by backup script can only be restored to an APM server with the identical install path. There is no work around for restoring to a different APM path.

For example, if you run backup.sh in APM server in install path /opt/ibm, and attempt to restore data to a different APM server path (/opt/IBM), then restore.sh script fails with following error:

ERROR: Your backup requires IBM Cloud Application Performance Management to be installed into the following directory: "/opt/ibm".

Moving APM server to a different path

Due to restore restriction for the APM path, if you must move the APM server to a different directory, you will need to manually recreate the objects and some data will be lost. See details below.

Following "configuration" settings will be lost and will have to be recreated:

1)  Application definitions
2)  Custom resource groups
3)  Cstom threshold definitions
4)  Threshold to resource group distribution information
5)   All config performed through the agent configuration UI
6)   Synthetic script config and distribution
7)   All of advanced configuration UI settings
8)   Any LDAP or basic user registry config settings
9)   If OIDC had been disabled, then those settings will be lost
10) If single sign-on to products like TCR or DASH, then LTPA  configuration will be lost
11) Custom UI certificates (if it was set up)
12) Certificates used by agents to connect to the APM server if HTTPS was configured for this communication
13) Role based access control configuration (RBAC)
14) Custom passwords that were set for APM server users such as smadmin and the MongoDB user.   (requires configuration of custom DB2 passwords as part of or after APM 8.1.4. install)

Following information in the databases will be lost:

1)  SCR database has resource definitions - these will be recreated when applications and resource groups are recreated and agents connect to the new APM server.
2)  DATAMART database which has transaction tracking metrics used for TCR reports and for display in some of the dashboard pages
3)  WAREHOUS database which has the resource monitoring metrics from the agents so is used to display all of the data in the agent dashboard pages (except for those pages that display transaction tracking data or deep dive / diagnostics data -- the latter is not stored on the APM server and is requested on-demand).

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