Question

Solved1.54K views7th July 2023Scheduler

1

Justien Decuypere [SLC] [DevOps Advocate]322 4th July 2023 1 Comment

Hi

For retrieving daily backups from XOS encoder devices I need 260 scheduled tasks for each XOS device.

I made an Excel with all the needed information to make the scheduled task per device.

I was wondering if anybody already automatically made scheduled tasks based on a list from Excel?

Thanks in advance!

Kind regards

Justien

Marieke Goethals [SLC] [DevOps Catalyst] Selected answer as best 7th July 2023

Justien Decuypere [SLC] [DevOps Advocate] commented 7th July 2023

Hi

Thank you all for the help, it indeed seems to work fine in the following way of using one scheduled task that calls an automation script that iterates across all the devices of a CI Type that then again calls the subscript that generates the actual backups. We are going to use two scheduled tasks depending on the view because the devices are running on two different DMAs, but compared to 260 tasks in the beginning, this seems acceptable to me. 😉

3 Answers

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Leander Druwel [SLC] [DevOps Member]2.03K Posted 5th July 2023 2 Comments

Also adding, it might be an option to have this completely managed by our IDP suite (Inventory, Discovery and Provisioning), as it is available on the platform and is designed to not only discover and provision the elements in an automated way, but also manage the device backups.

More information on:

Configuration tab | DataMiner Docs

Marieke Goethals [SLC] [DevOps Catalyst] Selected answer as best 7th July 2023

Justien Decuypere [SLC] [DevOps Advocate] commented 5th July 2023

Hi Leander, thank you for the comment. Now, it is done via IDP. In the admin page of IDP an extra CI Type is added. In the admin configuration management tab, a backup script is added. So in the configuration tab, backups can be taken based on the selected elements. Now, we make use of daily scheduled tasks per device so indeed there’s probably a better way to do this. Do you know how you can do a daily backup for all the devices of a certain CI type in IDP?

Leander Druwel [SLC] [DevOps Member] commented 5th July 2023

Hey Justien, I believe that is done by adding a process to IDP, and referencing the backup activity.

https://docs.dataminer.services/user-guide/Standard_Apps/IDP/Using_DataMiner_IDP/Overview_of_the_IDP_app/IDP_Processes_tab.html

Hi

Thank you all for the help, it indeed seems to work fine in the following way of using one scheduled task that calls an automation script that iterates across all the devices of a CI Type that then again calls the subscript that generates the actual backups. We are going to use two scheduled tasks depending on the view because the devices are running on two different DMAs, but compared to 260 tasks in the beginning, this seems acceptable to me. 😉
Hi Leander, thank you for the comment. Now, it is done via IDP. In the admin page of IDP an extra CI Type is added. In the admin configuration management tab, a backup script is added. So in the configuration tab, backups can be taken based on the selected elements. Now, we make use of daily scheduled tasks per device so indeed there’s probably a better way to do this. Do you know how you can do a daily backup for all the devices of a certain CI type in IDP?
Hey Justien, I believe that is done by adding a process to IDP, and referencing the backup activity.

https://docs.dataminer.services/user-guide/Standard_Apps/IDP/Using_DataMiner_IDP/Overview_of_the_IDP_app/IDP_Processes_tab.html

score 4 · Answer 1 · 2023-07-04T17:53:47+00:00

I was also wondering, what is the reason that you need 260 separate tasks, one for each individual device? If all of them need a daily back-up, it is not fine to just create one scheduled task that then starts an automation to iterate across all devices to take a back-up?

Good suggestion! We’re gonna take a look at it again in our team if we could make that work.

score 3 · Answer 2 · 2023-07-05T12:31:23+00:00

Hi Justien,

In the question below you can find an example to create a scheduled task programmatically:

automation – create schedule tasks

In your script, you will need to parse the Excel file. For each row available in the file you could create a scheduled task using the example above.

Small question, does it need to be a Excel file? If possible, try to collect this information in a CSV file. Parsing a CSV file does not require extra libraries.

Hope it helps.

Hi Miguel, thank you for your comment. We will consider the different options brought up. But maybe better to not use this since it’s an internal call and it is not officially supported?
Hi Justien,
In this case, I believe the answer from Leander is the best approach for your use case. In that way you don’t need to build your own automation scripts.

Is there a way to automatically make scheduled tasks from a list in Excel?

3 Answers