SLA Policies

An SLA policy defines backup requirements for your sources i.e. how often backups should be taken and how long they should be retained. When a policy is scoped to an environment and data class, Plakar Control Plane automatically creates backup schedules for all source apps that match.

flowchart TD
  subgraph Policy["SLA Policy"]
    Requirements["Frequency & retention"]
    Scope["Scope\nenvironment · data class · tag"]
    PolicyStore["Store app"]
  end

  subgraph Sources["Source Apps"]
    S1["Source A\nproduction · database"]
    S2["Source B\nproduction · critical"]
    S3["Source C\nstaging · database"]
  end

  Scope -->|"auto-match"| S1 & S2
  S1 & S2 -->|"schedule created"| Backup["Backup"]
  Requirements --> Backup
  Backup --> PolicyStore

To create a policy, provide a name, then define the backup requirements and select a store app to use for backups.

You define requirements across six time granularities. You can configure any combination of these:

• Daily
• Weekly
• Monthly
• Yearly

For each granularity you enable, you configure:

• Frequency - how often a backup should be taken within that period, for example 4 times or once a day
• Retention - how long backup restore points should be kept

You then select a store where the backup will be stored and toggle whether you want to run a check task on the after each. It’s recommended to leave this on.

Before creating the policy, Plakar Control Plane shows you a summary of the policy contract based on your selections.

The summary shows the RPO and lookback derived from your settings. RPO is the maximum data loss window based on your most frequent backup, and lookback is how far back you can restore from based on your retention settings.

After creating a policy, you are immediately taken to the scoping page to set up the environment and data class filters.

Supported scope filters include:

• Environment - the environment the policy applies to. Environments can be managed from the settings.
• Data Class - one or more data classes the policy applies to. Data classes can be managed from the settings.
• Tag - narrows the matched sources down further to only those carrying the specified tag. Useful when environment and data class alone would match more sources than intended.

Plakar Control Plane matches all source apps against the configured scope. Any source app whose environment and data class match the policy is automatically scheduled according to the policy rules. When a new source app is added with matching values, it is automatically picked up by the policy without any additional configuration.

A source app can be covered by multiple policies if their scopes overlap. This allows policies to be layered for example, a general policy covering all production sources and a stricter policy specifically covering production databases.

Once a policy is scoped, the policy scheduler automatically creates backup schedules for all matching sources using the store app selected when the policy was created. See the policy scheduler documentation for more details.