You might be thinking, “Why do I need Oracle Cloud EPM backups when Oracle does that for me?”. That’s an excellent question. The problem is that while Oracle does perform nightly backups of each Oracle Cloud EPM instance, they overwrite that backup each night. So at any given time I only have one backup. To make things even worse, Oracle can and will age items out of the cloud. This means that even if we had multiple backups on our pod (for instance if we renamed the artifacts), we’ll eventually start losing them to the data retention policies.
So what do we do? We generate a new backup every night and download it to a local server. The good news is that you almost certainly have a local server already running EPM Automate. EPM Automate is the automation tool for Oracle’s Cloud EPM suite. You can use EPM Automate to load data, execute calculations, update meta-data, and…perform backups. So, we’ve established that we likely need more than a single night of backups, but how many do we need? This will depend on a few things like the size of your application backups and the frequency of change to the application. Once you understand the size of your backup, you can then layer in how much space you have on your local server to store backups. For example, if our backup file is 500mb and we want to keep 30 days of backups, we essentially need at least 15gb of space. In our example, we will keep 30 days of daily backups.
Batch vs. PowerShell
Now that we have determined what we are backing up and how many backups we need to keep, we need to move on to actually performing the backups. With EPM Automate, we have two commonly used options. First, we have the old-school method of a batch file. Batch files are great because they just work, and you can find a ton of information on the web about how to do things. Batch files are, however, very limited in their ability to do things like e-mail notifications and remote calls without external tools. That brings us to PowerShell. PowerShell is essentially a batch that has the full set of .NET programming capability along with other goodies not directly from .NET. What does that mean exactly? That means there is very little you can’t do in PowerShell.
Directory Setup
Before we configure anything, we need to get a folder structure put together to support scripting, logging, and the actual backup files. You may already have a structure for your automation processes, but for our example, it will look something like this:
- C:\Oracle
- C:\Oracle\Automation
- C:\Oracle\Automation\Backup
- C:\Oracle\Automation\Log
- C:\Oracle\Automation
EPM Automate Configuration
EPM Automate is a great tool, but we do need to perform a little bit of setup to get going. For instance, while EPM Automate supports plain text passwords, that wouldn’t pass muster with most IT security groups. So before we get into PowerShell, let’s encrypt our password. This is a fairly easy process. We’ll start up a command prompt and change directory to our EPM Automate bin directory:
cd\
cd Oracle\EPMAutomate\bin
Once we are in the right directory, we can encrypt our password:
epmautomate.bat encrypt YourPasswordGoesHere PickYourKey c:\Oracle\Automation\password.epw
Here are the parameters:
- Command – the command EPM Automate will execute
- encrypt
- Password – the password of the account you plan to use
- YourPasswordGoesHere
- Key – you specify anything you want to use to encrypt the password
- PickYourKey
- Password File – The full path and file name of the password file that will be generated
- c:\Oracle\Automation\password.epw
Once we execute the command, we should have our password file so that we can continue. It should look something like this:
Oracle Cloud EPM Backups using PowerShell
Now that we have EPM Automate ready to go, we can move over to PowerShell where we will create our actual backup process.
Path Variables
We’ll start by defining our path variables. This will include paths to EPM Automate, our main automation directory, our log path, and our backup path:
#Path Variables
$EpmAutomatePath = "C:\Oracle\EPMAutomate\bin\epmautomate.bat"
$AutomationPath = "C:\Oracle\Automation"
$LogPath = "C:\Oracle\Automation\Log"
$BackupPath = "C:\Oracle\Automation\Backup"
Date Variables
Next we’ll define all of our data related variables. This includes our days to keep (which is negative on purpose as we are going back in time), our current date, the math that gets us back to our deletion period, a timestamp that will be used for various things, and finally our log file name based on that timestamp.
#Date Variables
$DaysToKeep = "-30"
$CurrentDate = Get-Date
$DatetoDelete = $CurrentDate.AddDays($DaysToKeep)
$TimeStamp = Get-Date -format "yyyyMMddHHmm"
$LogFileName = "Backup" + $TimeStamp + ".log"
Oracle Cloud EPM Variables
Now we need to set our Oracle Cloud EPM specific variables. This will include our URL to our instance of Oracle Cloud EPM, the username we’ll use to log in, and the path to the password file that we just finished generating:
#Oracle Cloud EPM Variables
$OracleEPMurl = "https://epm-myepmnamehere.epm.us-phoenix-1.ocs.oraclecloud.com"
$OracleEPMuser = "yourusername"
$OracleEPMpass = "c:\Oracle\Automation\password.epw"
Snapshot Variables
We’re nearing the end of variables as we define our snapshot specific variables. These variables will tell us the name of our export, the name of the file that we are downloading based on that name, and the new name of our snapshot that will include our timestamp:
#Snapshot Variables
$OracleEPMExportName = "Artifact Snapshot"
$OracleEPMExportDownloadName = $OracleEPMExportName + ".zip"
$OracleEPMExportRename = $OracleEPMExportName + $TimeStamp + ".zip"
Start Logging
I like to log everything so that if something does go wrong, we have a chance to figure it out after the fact. This uses the combination of our log path and log file name variables:
#Start Logging
Start-Transcript -path $LogPath\$LogFileName
Log Into Oracle Cloud EPM
We can finally log into PBCS! We’ll start by displaying our action and the current system time. This way we can see how long things take when we look at the log file. We’ll then issue the login command using all of our variables.
#Log into Oracle Cloud EPM
Write-Host ([System.String]::Format("Login to source: {0}", [System.DateTime]::Now))
&$EpmAutomatePath "login" $OracleEPMuser $OracleEPMpass $OracleEPMurl
Create the Snapshot
Again we’ll display our action and current system time. We then kick off the snapshot process. We do this because we want to ensure that we have the most recent snapshot for our archiving purposes:
#Create Oracle Cloud EPM snapshot
Write-Host ([System.String]::Format("Export snapshot from source: {0}", [System.DateTime]::Now))
&$EpmAutomatePath exportsnapshot $OracleEPMExportName
Download the Snapshot
Once the snapshot has been created, we’ll move on to downloading the snapshot after we display our action and current system time:
#Download Oracle Cloud EPM snapshot
Write-Host ([System.String]::Format("Download snapshot from source: {0}", [System.DateTime]::Now))
&$EpmAutomatePath downloadfile $OracleEPMExportName
Archive the Snapshot
Once the file has been downloaded, we can then archive the snapshot to our backup folder as we rename the file:
#Rename the file using the timestamp and move the file to the backup path
Write-Host ([System.String]::Format("Rename downloaded file: {0}", [System.DateTime]::Now))
Move-Item $AutomationPath\$OracleEPMExportDownloadName $BackupPath\$OracleEPMExportRename
Delete Old Snapshots
Now that we have everything archived, we just need to delete anything older than our DateToDelete variable:
#Delete snapshots older than $DaysToKeep
Write-Host ([System.String]::Format("Delete old snapshots: {0}", [System.DateTime]::Now))
Get-ChildItem $BackupPath -Recurse | Where-Object { $_.LastWriteTime -lt $DatetoDelete } | Remove-Item
Log Out of Oracle Cloud EPM
We’re almost done and we can now log out of our Oracle Cloud EPM instance:
#Log out of PBCS
Write-Host ([System.String]::Format("Logout of source: {0}", [System.DateTime]::Now))
&$EpmAutomatePath "logout"
Stop Logging
Now that we have completed our process, we’ll stop logging:
#Stop Logging
Stop-Transcript
The Whole Shebang
#Path Variables
$EpmAutomatePath = "C:\Oracle\EPMAutomate\bin\epmautomate.bat"
$AutomationPath = "C:\Oracle\Automation"
$LogPath = "C:\Oracle\Automation\Log"
$BackupPath = "C:\Oracle\Automation\Backup"
#Date Variables
$DaysToKeep = "-30"
$CurrentDate = Get-Date
$DatetoDelete = $CurrentDate.AddDays($DaysToKeep)
$TimeStamp = Get-Date -format "yyyyMMddHHmm"
$LogFileName = "Backup" + $TimeStamp + ".log"
#Oracle Cloud EPM Variables
$OracleEPMurl = "https://epm-myepmnamehere.epm.us-phoenix-1.ocs.oraclecloud.com"
$OracleEPMuser = "brian@olympusconsulting.com"
$OracleEPMpass = "c:\Oracle\Automation\password.epw"
#Snapshot Variables
$OracleEPMExportName = "Artifact Snapshot"
$OracleEPMExportDownloadName = $OracleEPMExportName + ".zip"
$OracleEPMExportRename = $OracleEPMExportName + $TimeStamp + ".zip"
#Start Logging
Start-Transcript -path $LogPath\$LogFileName
#Log into Oracle Cloud EPM
Write-Host ([System.String]::Format("Login to source: {0}", [System.DateTime]::Now))
&$EpmAutomatePath "login" $OracleEPMuser $OracleEPMpass $OracleEPMurl
#Create Oracle Cloud EPM snapshot
Write-Host ([System.String]::Format("Export snapshot from source: {0}", [System.DateTime]::Now))
&$EpmAutomatePath exportsnapshot $OracleEPMExportName
#Download Oracle Cloud EPM snapshot
Write-Host ([System.String]::Format("Download snapshot from source: {0}", [System.DateTime]::Now))
&$EpmAutomatePath downloadfile $OracleEPMExportName
#Rename the file using the timestamp and move the file to the backup path
Write-Host ([System.String]::Format("Rename downloaded file: {0}", [System.DateTime]::Now))
Move-Item $AutomationPath\$OracleEPMExportDownloadName $BackupPath\$OracleEPMExportRename
#Delete snapshots older than $DaysToKeep
Write-Host ([System.String]::Format("Delete old snapshots: {0}", [System.DateTime]::Now))
Get-ChildItem $BackupPath -Recurse | Where-Object { $_.LastWriteTime -lt $DatetoDelete } | Remove-Item
#Log out of PBCS
Write-Host ([System.String]::Format("Logout of source: {0}", [System.DateTime]::Now))
&$EpmAutomatePath "logout"
#Stop Logging
Stop-Transcript
The Results
Here’s the actual execution:
Now let’s see the results in the file system. First the log files:
Next the actual log file:
And here are our snapshots with the timestamp:
