System and method for backing up management components of a software-defined data center (SDDC) managed by a cloud-based service uses backup rules for the SDDC, which are used to configure a backup manager agent in the SDDC. The backup rules are then used by the backup manager agent to determine whether at least one of system logs generated by the management components in the SDDC, which are monitored by the backup manager agent, satisfies the backup rules to initiate a backup operation for at least one of the management components of the SDDC.