Application Exclusions in ServiceNow enable users to exclude applications they don’t consider critical. This reduces Own's API consumption on the instance, thereby reducing backup durations, errors, and performance load.
Applications are groups of tables in ServiceNow. Application Exclusions provides ServiceNow users with the ability to bulk exclude tables at the application level.
Application Exclusions builds upon the Backup Exclusion Policy by adding a new Application exclusion rule.
Application Exclusions is only available after a service is created. Users need to create a Backup service, abort the backup or let it complete, and then apply application exclusions from the Application Exclusions page.
The Add Applications to Exclude modal is displayed in the Application Exclusions page. The Applications List displays the latest list of applications from the ServiceNow instance. Applications can have many unique names, using a mix of symbols and characters, all numbers, or all characters. The Applications list is always retrieved whenever a new Application exclusion rule is created. This verifies we have the most up-to-date metadata.
The Excluded application” list initially shows all existing application exclusions grayed out. This was designed to show existing applications' exclusions rules, without having to close the modal to view them in the Backup Exclusion lists. Users still have to remove existing application exclusions by closing the modal and clicking the “X” icon next to the rule in the Backup Exclusions Rules list. Click the checkbox next to the application to select the applications that aren't mission critical to backup and you want to exclude from your backups. After one or more selections have been made, the right arrow is enabled to move the applications to the Excluded applications list.
When one or more application exclusions are selected in the “Excluded applications” list, the left arrow is enabled to move the application(s) back to the “Applications List”. This means you do not want to exclude this application from your backup.
After application exclusions have been finalized, you choose a value from the mandatory Exclusion Reason dropdown to enable the Save button.
Clicking Save applies the application exclusions and filters out the corresponding tables from the next backup. To apply the application exclusions, run an on demand full backup or let the next scheduled full backup run. The Revert button resets the modal to the initial state and removes any application exclusions from the Excluded applications list.
Tables belonging to an excluded application are still displayed as empty in the Backup Page, with a message.
Exclusion Considerations
Tables that belong to an application exclusion rule, as well as a table exclusion rule, still show up in the Specific Tables list. Users can choose to run a Specific Table backup on the table(s). The job runs but doesn't back up the table.
Given a list of application exclusions, the backup excludes tables that are assigned to the excluded applications. If an excluded table(s) within an application is referenced by a table in nonexcluded applications, they are included in the backup. This verifies we're backing up references that may be crucial if and when it comes time to restore.