How miniBRS Works

This article assumes that you have miniBRS up and running on your machine and now you want to start using it, by scheduling few DAGs. Before moving ahead in this article, please make sure you already have checked out the Settings article, As we are going to use concepts and settings defined there, In explaining incident use case. Without any further ado Let's get started.

Incident Backup Use Case

Here we shall explain to you, How you can register your Service Now instance and a storage platform such as Amazon S3 in miniBRS and change the configuration settings provided as per your requirement. We shall use a step by step process to explain this use case.

Register Instance: The current version of miniBRS is designed to serve one Service Now instance at a time. This means, a single instance of miniBRS must be dedicated to a single instance of Service Now. All workflows provided by miniBRS assume that the Service Now instance that is to be used by the system is registered with servicenow_default connection id. So, you must override the values in the connection id servicenow_default. This connection id has dummy values at the installation time which needs to be overridden by user-specific values. In case this connection id is not present due to some reason, The system will throw an exception ServiceNowConnectionNotFoundException
Register Storage: Registering storage in miniBRS is similar to registering your service now instance. Once you have decided which storage to use for your data ingestion, Specify the storage_type in the config variable. storage_type attribute of config variable takes values such as "sftp", "s3", "dropbox", "googledrive", "mysql", "postgres", "mssql".

Once you have specified the type now you need to provide the details of the storage in its specific connection id. For each supported storage platform miniBRS has a default connection id specific to it in the Connections table. e.g If you want to use SFTP as your storage site, you need to provide details in sftp_default connection, similarly, for Amazon S3 storage you can place your s3_access_key_id and s3_secret_key_id respectively in the Login and Password fields of the s3_default connection id also for s3_region_name and s3_bucket_name you can use Extras field to specify your values. Please refer to Settings page for details about the connections available.
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Important Note:

Once you specify your storage type to be used in 
`storage_type` attribute of `config` variable, 
The system expects the credentials of that 
storage type in its specific connection id, 
If the connection id for the storage is not
present system will throw storage exception 
specific to that storage e.g 
`SFTPConnectionNotFoundException`, 
`S3ConnectionNotFound Exception` etc
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Set config values: So, you have registered your service now instance and storage with miniBRS, Now you want to start generating workflows. To generate workflows you need to set the values in the config variable. Please check the details of each attribute provided in config variable at Settings page

Decide which table you need to fetch data from and add the table name in the tables list, Also decide how many days ago system should fetch data from your instance and set the value of start_date to the number of days in past.

Decide how often you need to fetch the records and set the value to frequency attribute of the config variable. If you want to have email alerts, set the value of the email attribute the recipient email address, make sure you use email option only after you have configured email server for the system.

Once you complete all the steps mentioned above, miniBRS will start reading the configuration and generate the workflows for you. You must wait about 2 minutes to get your changes reflected in the UI. You can check the generated workflows from the DAGs UI of the webserver.