Insights On-Premises Activity File Backup

The Insights On-Premises processes data that are retrieved from Activity Files.. Activity Files are created every 10 minutes by the ControlUp Monitors and in a Monitor Cluster, saved on all monitor machines.

This article outlines the concept of Activity Files and provides information on how to set up a backup and deletion policy from the Monitor settings.

What are Activity Files?

Activity files are text-based documents (XML files) containing data of your monitored data sources. Without activity files there is no data visible in Insights On-Premises as there is no data to ingest for the IOP Forwarders.

Prerequisites

• COP version 8.6 or later

See Current Backup Configuration

When you first set up your COP server, you are asked to provide the IP / FQDN as well as the path of the activity and backup files.

If you already installed the COP server, you can access the configuration of the folder holding the Activity Files and backup from the COP server,

1. Open Programs and Features from the Control Panel
2. Right-click ControlUp Server > Change
   
3. In the wizard, click Insights On-Premises (IOP) Configuration
   
4. Here, you can see the current configuration of your IOP environment, such as IP/FQDN of your IOP appliance/master node, activity files and backup files path.
   

Alternatively, you can see the current IOP configuration by opening the registry on the COP server. Relevant registry keys are described below:

Path: Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Smart-X\ControlUpServer\IOP.

• BackupZipFolder. Backup Files Location.
• Port. The communication port between IOP server and ControlUp server.
• ServerName. The IP / FQDN of the IOP server.
• SharedFolder. Activity Files Folder
• UseSSL. Defines if http or https should be used for accessing IOP.

Set up a Backup Policy for Activity Files

1. In the console, browse to Settings > Monitors or click the Monitoring status button in the Monitor panel.
2. Click Monitors settings and browse to the On-Prem Monitor Backup tab.
   

In this wizard, you can configure how the ControlUp Monitor should back up, compress and delete activity files. The wizard is split up into two parts with different options.

Backup and zip

In this window, you can set up a backup and deletion policy. The following options are available:

• Activity files maintenance job interval in minutes. Controls how often the backup job runs. It is set to 1440 minutes (every 24 hours) by default.
• Minimum # files before backing up. The Activity Files folder must contain at least a certain number of files before a backup can begin. This is set to 288 files by default.
• Minimum file age in days before backing up. Specify how many days have passed since the file was created before a backup job can be considered. The default value is 1.
• Minimum file age in minutes before backing up. Sets a value in minutes. The backup will only include files older than this value. 120 is the minimum value allowed.

Backup notifications

The new notification feature in COP version 8.6.5 creates an event if the monitor fails to archive the activity files. Prior to 8.6.5, no indication was provided when a monitor could not create a ZIP file for whatever reason.

Delete backed up zip files

Here you can define a deletion policy for backup files.

• Minimum days before deleting the backup up zipped files. Specifies the minimum number of days that zipped backup files are kept before getting deleted.
• Delete zipped files if minimum diskspace reaches below. Automatically delete the zipped files if disk space falls below a certain threshold. As the default is 10%, zipped files are automatically deleted if there is less than 10% free space on the disk.