What is a recommended practice for testing disaster recovery readiness for NPM?

• A. Regular backups, tested disaster recovery procedures, and version compatibility checks.
• B. Rely on a single backup without testing.
• C. Disaster recovery is not necessary for NPM.
• D. Only back up configuration snapshots.

Answer: (A)

Disaster recovery readiness for NPM hinges on having a reliable restore path that protects data, validates that it can be recovered, and ensures the recovered system will run correctly after a disruption. The best practice combines three elements: regular backups, tested disaster recovery procedures, and version compatibility checks. Regular backups protect you from data loss by preserving the NPM database, configurations, and important artifacts. But backups alone aren’t enough—you need to practice the recovery steps so you know exactly who does what, in what order, and how long it will take to restore services, which is the essence of validating recovery time and success. Finally, version compatibility checks are crucial because you want to restore data into a supported NPM version and ensure that upgrades or downgrades won’t break the restored environment or its dashboards, alerts, and data structures.

Relying on a single backup without testing can fail when the restore point is corrupted or incompatible. Claiming DR isn’t necessary for NPM ignores the reality that outages, data loss, or corruption can affect monitoring. Limiting backups to configuration snapshots misses critical data like historical metrics and alert rules, leaving you unable to fully restore monitoring capabilities.