How to Hide Application Instances from view in the Unitrends UI

SUMMARY

Customers who add assets containing databases or VMs for which they do not wish to directly protect those sub-applications with Unitrends, or where those assets may also be part of clustered instances, may wish to hide those additional references from the UI for clarity.

ISSUE

In the Unitrends protect tab as well as when creating jobs, Unitrends itemizes not only servers individually, but additional instances contained within that server for database or VM level records. Customers often do not wish to see those all listed in the UI if they do not intend to use unitrends protection for them directly using agent application support. There is a command line method to hide those instances from view. 

 

RESOLUTION

The application instance object shown in the UI can be disabled from view.  Doing so requires a command line API process which advanced users may find useful.  The steps to hide or unhide an instance are contained below.  

TASKS

After upgrading to release 10.1, customers can use the unitrends-cli to mark database objects invisible.  This will both remove the display of these objects from the UI and will also prevent attempts to sync inventory of objects that are not intended to be protected. 

Warning: Advanced users only.  Unitrends Support assistance may be required for some customers to implement this feature. Use of the unitrends-cli to modify settings directly modifies database records for these objects. If done improperly this could result in unexpected behavior.  

Implementing this change is done for each application instance individually.
Implementing this change will require knowing the EXACT (case sensitive) spelling of the UI's display of the application name.
Implementing this feature also requires knowledge of the Application instance ID for the instance to change.  This information is not available in the UI.

The following processes require you to be logged into the appliance via SSH (PuTTY).
 

1. Locate the "client_id" value for the client containing the application you seek to hide.  You will see output for all systems, we have included an example of one below.  

unitrends-cli GET clients -x
 {
            "applications": [],
            "client_id": 4,
            "client_name": "SQL2016",
            "os_type": "Windows 2016",
            "system_id": 1,
            "system_name": "Train_S1"
}

2. After identifying the client_ID, you can re-run a different filter to get the specific application name listings for that instance.  Running this for all assets would be a significant output, so instead we will run the option to see this for only a single node.  Run the below command using the client_id from prior command

unitrends-cli GET clients -i <client_id>

3. You will see output as follows.  locate the Application Name from the output.   You can also note the current visibility status of that object.  

{
    "data": [
        {
            "applications": {
                "1": {
                    "name": "file-level",
                    "type": "file-level",
                    "visible": true
                },
                "26": {
                    "name": "SQL Server 2016",
                    "type": "SQL Server",
                    "visible": true
                }
            },
            "asset_type": "physical",

4. You can now format a command line to mark invisible the specified application using the information learned.  The name from step 3 and the client_id from step 1

unitrends-cli PUT clients -R '{ "applications": [ { "name": "SQL Server 2016", "visible": false } ] }' -i 4

NOTES

Warning: If these applications have already been configured for backup, cold, or hot copy jobs, they will remain configured in those jobs, but will no longer be visible in the UI to manipulate. Before hiding an application, ensure no protection of that application is in progress.  Backups for hidden objects will continue to be seen in the UI and will remain recoverable, but the application instance will not be an available target to choose for recovery unless unhidden.