Manage resource snapshots

This is for:

System Administrator

Your Coveo deployment probably includes more than one organization. Typically, Coveo customers have a production organization and at least one non-production organization. Since most of the changes you make in Coveo are effective immediately, a good practice is to test them in a non-production organization before applying them to your production organization.

To this end, the resource snapshot feature allows you to copy resource (for example, source, field, and query pipeline) configurations from one organization to the other, rather than reproducing them manually in a second organization. This feature is especially useful when you manage a large number of resources and want to make bulk changes.

Overall, the resource snapshot feature allows you to:

  • Copy multiple resource configurations from one organization to the other.

  • Review a diff of the changes you import in an organization.

  • Save snapshots as backups.

  • Revert your changes by importing a previous configuration.

  • Download and import snapshots into a version control tool.

Note

Not all resource types can be included in a snapshot yet, although the current offer should cover multiple use cases. See Supported resources for a list of the resource types that the snapshot feature supports.

If you would like to include additional resource types in a snapshot, contact your Coveo representative. We will consider further expanding the snapshot feature depending on the demand.

Documentation subdivision

The resource snapshot management documentation is divided as follows. Readers are advised to read these articles in order, and then to review the Resource Snapshot Management section when ready to start working with snapshots.

  1. Basic Resource Snapshot Workflow

  2. Snapshot Structure

  3. Privileges Required to Manage Snapshots

  4. Matching analogous resources (advanced)

  5. Manage an organization with resource snapshots (Advanced)

Tip

To manage snapshots programmatically, also read how to Manage Organization Snapshots With the Coveo CLI. If you have developer skills, the CLI greatly reduces manual intervention and lets you simplify your deployments with modern infrastructure-as-code.

Resource snapshot management

Create a snapshot of your organization

To create a new resource snapshot in an organization, you can either import a snapshot file saved on your computer or generate a snapshot of your organization in its current state.

To generate a snapshot:

  1. On the Resource Snapshots (platform-ca | platform-eu | platform-au) page, click Create Snapshot, and then select Of your organization.

  2. In the Create Snapshot of Your Organization panel that appears, you can choose to clear the Include dependencies automatically box. When the box is checked, your snapshot includes not only the desired resources, but all other resources that depend on them. For example, a snapshot of a query pipeline would also include the rules of this pipeline and the machine learning models associated with it. The Include dependencies automatically box is checked by default, as we recommend including dependencies in your snapshot to ensure that the resources you copy to a different organization work identically to those in the original organization.

  3. Select the resources to include in your snapshot. If you want to index only some resources, specify the desired resources.

  4. Enter a descriptive name for your snapshot. This description will appear on the Resource Snapshots (platform-ca | platform-eu | platform-au) page.

  5. Click Create snapshot or, alternatively, click Save for CLI to download your selection for usage in Coveo CLI.

Note

Not all resource types can be included in a snapshot yet, although the current offer should cover multiple use cases. See Supported resources for a list of the resource types that the snapshot feature supports.

If you would like to include additional resource types in a snapshot, contact your Coveo representative. We will consider further expanding the snapshot feature depending on the demand.

Export a snapshot

Once you’ve created a snapshot of your organization, you should want to export it to a different organization where you’ll apply it.

  1. On the Resource Snapshots (platform-ca | platform-eu | platform-au) page, click the desired snapshot, and then click Export in the Action bar.

  2. In the Export Snapshot panel that opens, select a destination organization.

  3. Enter a descriptive name for your snapshot. This description will appear on the Resource Snapshots (platform-ca | platform-eu | platform-au) page of the destination organization.

  4. Click Export.

Apply a snapshot to an organization

Applying a snapshot to an organization imports the resource configurations included in the snapshot. If the destination organization contains a different version of a resource included in the snapshot, the snapshot version replaces this version.

  1. On the Resource Snapshots (platform-ca | platform-eu | platform-au) page, select the desired snapshot, and then click Apply in the Action bar.

  2. The subpage that appears shows whether the prerequisites are met.

    • Coveo first checks whether it has all the information it needs. Some sensitive pieces of information may be needed to create or update your resources properly (for example, source credentials). In such case, authorize Coveo to import them from the origin organization, or click Provide via our API to create them manually.

    • Next, Coveo checks whether you have the privileges required to edit all resources in the snapshot, as they are required to apply the snapshot. If you don’t have all of these privileges, contact your Coveo administrator.

  3. Once all prerequisites are met, click Continue to snapshot validation. Coveo will check whether your snapshot is valid and can be applied smoothly.

  4. Once the validation process is complete, you can review a diff of the changes to apply. Should errors be detected in some resources, you may want to review them as well, and perhaps modify your snapshot or organization resources to fix them.

  5. Once all errors are fixed, click Continue to apply snapshot, and then, in the dialog, confirm that you want to apply the snapshot.

To review the changes applied to an organization, we recommend you use the Activity Browser (platform-ca | platform-eu | platform-au).

Limits

  • An organization can contain up to 20 snapshots. Should you create or import more, the oldest will be deleted.

  • Snapshots are automatically deleted 6 months after their creation.

  • Some resources aren’t supported yet.

Supported resources

Not all resource types can be included in a snapshot yet, although the current offer should cover multiple use cases.

If you would like to include additional resource types in a snapshot, contact your Coveo representative. We will consider further expanding the snapshot feature depending on the demand.

The snapshot feature supports the following resources:

  • Sources

    • Mappings

  • Extensions

  • Fields

  • Security providers

  • Query pipelines

    • Featured results

    • Filters

    • Query parameters

    • Query pipeline conditions

    • Ranking expressions

    • Ranking weights

    • Stop words

    • Thesaurus

    • Triggers

  • Search pages built with the legacy Interface Editor

  • Coveo Hosted Insight Panels

  • Coveo Machine Learning (Coveo ML)

    • Query Suggestion models (except Predictive Query Suggestion models)

    • Automatic Relevance Tuning models

    • Content Recommendation models

    • Model associations

  • Subscriptions

Known issue

A minor issue occurs when applying a snapshot that contains a source that indexes permissions, if this snapshot is imported from a different organization. A security provider is created successfully, but its ID includes the name of the origin organization rather than the name of the destination organization.

Coveo is aware of this issue and will fix it in an upcoming release. In the meantime, Coveo has validated that this problem doesn’t hinder your work.

What’s next?

See the Basic resource snapshot workflow to understand how resource snapshots are created, and then imported and applied to a different organization.