The configuration backup/rollback tool in ACI is a great feature that has saved my ass many times.

Any time I start making changes, I go do a one-time backup. If I get too far down a wrong path, I can easily rollback to that snapshot to set the fabric right again.

One thing that always bugged me though, was the inability to give that backup a customizable, user-friendly name.

I discovered this week that if we trigger that backup via the cobra SDK, we can assign any name we want. Here is the code, which is also available on my Github page.

#!/usr/bin/env python

# list of packages that should be imported for this code to work
import cobra.mit.access
import cobra.mit.request
import cobra.mit.session
import cobra.model.fabric
import cobra.model.pol
import cobra.model.config
import credentials
from cobra.internal.codec.xmlcodec import toXMLStr
import requests.packages.urllib3
requests.packages.urllib3.disable_warnings()

def take_backup ():
#Login to APIC
ls = cobra.mit.session.LoginSession('https://'+credentials.ACI_login["ipaddr"], credentials.ACI_login["username"], credentials.ACI_login["password"])
md = cobra.mit.access.MoDirectory(ls)
md.login()

polUni = cobra.model.pol.Uni('')
fabricInst = cobra.model.fabric.Inst(polUni)

backup = cobra.model.config.ExportP(fabricInst, name="backup_created_with_python", snapshot="true", adminSt="triggered")

c = cobra.mit.request.ConfigRequest()
c.addMo(fabricInst)
md.commit(c)

take_backup()