Technical documentation

This is a feature that is released with version 8.1.0

In the Backups dashboard you can get an overview of your node backup management. It will give you an overview of all nodes that are being polled for backups.

When you first start NetYCE, This screen will be empty. You have to set up your nodes to be polled. The steps you need to perform are:

1. First you need to model your nodes. Either in the CMDB, or in YCE.
2. You then need to have a node group that contains these nodes.
3. Then create a polling group that contains this node group

As soon as you have a polling group that contains the nodes you want to track for backups, they will be picked up automatically. You need to wait a bit for the nodes to be put in the queue and be polled, but this should not take more than five minutes.

The node backup status grid gives you an overview of all the nodes that are being polled for backups. It shows the nodes' hostnames and vendor types. Next poll shows the next time the node will be polled for a backup. If this backup shows any differences, it will be saved to the database and any compliance policies will be re-checked.

Nodes can have three statuses:

• Active are nodes that are actively being polled
• Pending are nodes that have a stored backup, however something went wrong during the latest poll
• Disabled are nodes where polls have failed for a number of consecutive times (as set by its polling group). It will not be polled until manually triggered by the “Backup now” button.

If the most recent poll has failed, the Cause column contains the reason why. The details view will show you more information on the node. Configs opens the config diffs view, where you can see the entire history of the backups of the node.

The “Backup Now” button will set the Next poll time of a node to now. This means that it will be picked up by the poller's next cycle. You can confirm this by looking at the poller queue. If the node in question is disabled, its status will be set back to active.

Nodes can fail to store a backup for a variety of reasons. The node can be down, it can be not reachable, your passwords can be wrong. This section groups the failed nodes together and by clicking on the causes, it will filter the Node backup status grid with those nodes, to give you an overview of how to solve it.

The chart here gives an overview of the statuses of all the nodes that are being polled for backups. Clicking on them will filter the Node backup status grid.

Nodes will not be polled for a backup immediately. Instead, they are put into a queue, and the poller will take the one with the most recent Next poll time, and go through the nodes in that order. In the Poller queue grid you will see an overview of this queue, and the nodes that are currently being polled. There are three statuses:

• Running: the node is currently being polled for a backup.
• Queued: the node is in the queue and will be picked up as soon as the poller gets to it.
• Waiting: the node is not in the queue, because its next poll time is too far into the future. As soon as the next Poll time is reached, it will be picked up by the next polling cycle.

There are a number of options:

• Polling groups brings you to the polling groups form. You need this to specify which nodes will be polled for backups.
• Restart poll cycle forces the poller to look at the queue and pick up nodes whose time it is to be polled. Usually you see the results in the queue instantly, but once in a while it may take a while. The poller will finish up any node it is currently polling before restarting.

The config search section allows you to search for strings through the backups that have been accumulated. It will search through either:

• Selected nodes: The nodes that you have selected in the above node backup status grid.
• Filtered nodes: All nodes in the above backup grid, with the search filters applied.
• Node group: All nodes in a specified node group

The default is Filtered nodes, until you select some nodes, which triggers a change to Selected nodes.

The search string will match any line in any matching config that contains it. Lines do not have to fully match, therefore wildcards are not supported. You can enter multiple lines, that means that only matches that check out on both consecutive lines will be returned. If you want a line to match anything, you can use the '.' notation, this helps to show more context around a line. For example the search string:

.
interface
.

Will show all lines containing the word 'interface', including the line that preceeds them and the line that succeeds them.

By default the Config search will search through the most recent config that it can find. If you want to change that, uncheck the “Last config only”-checkbox and specify the number of days in the past you want to look back for.

The results will appear in the right hand box, grouped by node. The expand and collapse buttons will expand and collapse the results per node. The download button allows you to download your report in .csv-format.

Please note that this tool will search through entire node configurations. So if you search through large volumes of nodes, this feature will take a while to produce its results; this can take up minutes.

When double-clicking on a node in the node backup status grid, it will take you to its details view.

Hostname and vendor type are the node's hostname and vendor type.

Nodes can have three statuses:

• Active are nodes that are actively being polled
• Pending are nodes that have a stored backup, however something went wrong during the latest poll
• Disabled are nodes where polls have failed for a number of consecutive times (as set by its polling group). It will not be polled until manually triggered by the “Backup now” button.

Next poll shows the next time the node will be polled for a backup. If this backup shows any differences, it will be saved to the database and any compliance policies will be re-checked.

Last successful poll shows when the node was successfully polled for the last time. The last failed poll shows when the most recent failed poll happened. Polling groups shows all polling groups that the node is in, and Schedule servers shows which yce servers are allowed to poll this node.

Poll failure details is shown in case the most recent poll for this node fails. This contains a log that can give you a bit of a clue as to what is going wrong.

The Show configs button brings you to the config diffs form.

The Backup now button sets the Next poll time for the node to now. This means that it will be polled for a backup on the next poller cycle, and if it had the status of disabled, it will now be active again.

The Show in inventory button will bring you to the inventory page. Either YCE or CMDB.

The Upload config button will allow you to manually submit a config to store in the backup database.

These buttons will schedule a job for this node. This job can then be followed for debugging purposes in the Job logs

The Create debug job button will schedule a job that polls the node's config and checks it for differences. This is the same thing that the backups poller does for each node, but this is a job that can be followed in the job logs in details. We don't normally show these jobs in the job logs, because most backup jobs won't have an issue, and otherwise the job logs will get flooded. However, this button allows you to check in detail why a node's backup is going wrong.

The Config restore job button will schedule a job that restores the node's config. This will either be the config that has been marked in the config diffs form, or the latest if no marked config can be found.