Self-service backup with PPDM and ServiceNow

Backup teams typically spend 10 to 15% of their time addressing adhoc backup, restore and client registration requests which can be automated to free up their time to focus on more valuable tasks. More importantly, this empowers application owners or DBAs to perform their own backups and restores to accelerate development and maintenance tasks.

In this video & blog, we demonstrate how to leverage PPDM's REST API, Ansible AWX and ServiceNow to automate these tasks. For those in a hurry, the video link is at the bottom of this article

When application owners or DBAs want to patch a server or perform any maintenance tasks, they rely on the backup team to perform these tasks. Typical SLA for such tasks is anywhere between 24 to 48 hours. This delays their development and deployment tasks as well as increases burden on the backup team who has other tasks to attend. 

REST API is fundamental for DevOps and automation use cases. Dell PowerProtect Data Manager's API-first architecture with fully featured REST API is easy to consume and integrate with Ansible, Python, PowerShell or any other languages or tools. This makes it the essential ingredient to solve this and other use cases. 

We have automated self-service for backup client registration, adhoc backup and restores using Ansible playbooks. The playbooks leverage PPDM's REST API. Ansible AWX provides RBAC controls and strong security features as well as a northbound REST API of its own that can be used by other tools. In this case we drive Ansible AWX from ServiceNow which is one of the most popular ITSM tools in the market today. The following diagram shows the high level architecture

The video demo also demonstrates the ability to register a VM with a backup policy at the time of VM creation. This mechanism leverages vSphere's VM tags in conjunction with PPDM dynamic policies. The following screenshot shows the full range of capabilities available in our demo environment at the moment including the DPaaS tasks discussed in this article

A very important aspect of this demo is the cloud experience it provides. The user only needs the Virtual Machine to back up. For security reasons, the list includes only VMs that are owned by the user. From this point Ansible works in the background to get the job done without any further user intervention.

After a few minutes the backup job completes, and the user gets a notification in Teams

For completeness the 7 minute video demo shows also all the inner workings that happen in the background.