Hi Community,

My team is looking to improve and automate our data backup process. While we know that Apptio performs regular backups, we would like to have a secondary option to ensure we can continue working with our data, at least in Excel format.

Would Datalink be suitable for this purpose? Our CSM also mentioned the possibility of using API calls.

Has anyone set up a similar solution and could share their experience?

Best regards,
Anton

While in principle possible, @Anton Karatkevich, what data would you want to back up? Sure, you could download some key tables, but that wouldn't preserve allocation lines or anything like that.

We do something like that for key data: BUs, business services, applications, drilling down to Cost Pools and IT Towers.

Every year I run a report that feeds 8 historical data tables. We then have a look-back report spanning data from 2017 to today. Since it's a one-off, I haven't bothered with a Datalink connector, but it could be done.

I described this process in my blog post here (link). Let me know if you need more information.

Hi @Guillermo Cuadrado,

Thanks for your reply! Helpful and interesting as always! We would like to have access to Actuals and Plan data (we store it in CT), so technically the process you have described is more or less can be applicable to what we want to do, with the only exception that we would like to make it more often :D

You think regular Datalink can be used for that purpose?

Best,
Anton

Yes. If you build a report that will collect the data you want to secure, you can create a connector for each of the tables in the report. Since you say you would want to have them in Excel, I suspect you'll have to use a local agent, as opposed to the Apptio-hosted one.

We do that in the other direction, i.e. loading data from local files to Apptio, using an on-prem agent. I have promised to write something about this soon (whatever that means 🤔🤔🤔). I'll see if I can test the download too.