Schedule a planned disaster recovery for your Splunk Cloud Platform environment

Up to twice a year, you can schedule a planned failover of your Splunk Cloud Platform environment when it is integrated with Cross-Region Disaster Recovery. Performing this planned failover lets you confirm that the service is performing as you expect and lets you test processes to ensure that your data collection and forwarding infrastructure sends data to your Splunk Cloud Platform environment properly even when it is active in the secondary cloud service provider region.

Cross-Region Disaster Recovery protects your environment from regional cloud service provider (CSP) failures in a primary region by failing over to a secondary region. This excludes protection of regional failures in the secondary region.

Do not use this procedure to report an actual disaster scenario.

Requirements for performing a planned disaster recovery

Meet the following requirements to perform a planned disaster recovery for your Splunk Cloud Platform environment:

• Your Splunk Cloud Platform environment must have Cross-Region Disaster Recovery implemented and functional
• You must use Splunk Cloud Platform within specific service limits. See Service limits and constraints in the Splunk Cloud Platform Service Manual
• The environment must not be within a maintenance window or going through an upgrade
• Your Splunk Cloud Platform environment must fail back to the primary region no sooner than 24 hours after the failover completes, and within 2 weeks of the planned failover.

You must give Splunk five to seven business days' notice for planned disaster recovery failovers.

Schedule a planned disaster recovery

To schedule a planned disaster recovery, perform the following steps:

1. Visit the Splunk Support Portal.
2. Select the Need Help? button.
3. Select Create a Case, then choose Support.
4. Select the Splunk Cloud environment on which you want to perform the test.
5. Select Cloud Change Request.
6. Select Standard Configuration.
7. In the Config file field, enter "CRDR".
8. In the Description field, enter the following text:

   Request for planned failover testing: Please schedule failover and failback of my Splunk Cloud Platform instance during the following time.
   
   Planned Failover
   Maintenance Window: {Date, 2-hour time window, Time zone}
   
   Planned Failback
   Maintenance Window: {Date, 2-hour time window, Timezone}
   

9. Select Submit.

After Splunk receives the request, it will contact you to schedule the appropriate maintenance windows to perform the planned disaster recovery.