How much time do your staff take to monitor backups?
The answer should be: very little.
Not because they don’t care, or you’re not tasking someone with the responsibility, but because your system should be designed such that your staff can see a “big picture” overview of all backups in a very short period of time. Assuming you do all your full backups on the weekend, your staff don’t arrive until 08.55 and spend the first 10 minutes grabbing a coffee, chatting, logging on, firing up email, browsers, etc., then if your staff can’t by 09.15 tell you what your percentage success rate for weekend backups, you’re monitoring backups wrong.
Don’t get this confused with troubleshooting. If backups encountered problems, troubleshooting may take considerably longer.
What unfortunately happens all too regularly is that monitoring and troubleshooting are seen as the same activity, or worse, they occupy the same amount of time. Nothing should be further from the truth.
What tools do you recommend for efficient monitoring?
At the high end you’ll want EMC’s Data Protection Advisor. If you’re wanting free, you may wish to check out Thierry Faidherbe’s Legato Reporter. Otherwise, there’s NMC reports and if you’re keen for a bit of scripting, the option of rolling your own savegroup parser.
To “roll your own”, what languages are supported? Powershell? Any good references? SCOM management packs (I have searched but no luck yet)?
Hi Greg,
It really comes down to whatever scripting language you’d like to use. While there’s some basic NetWorker APIs provided in Python, I believe any scripting language that has good text parsing capabilities will be more than sufficient. I personally use Perl, but that’s because I’ve been using it since 1996…
Cheers.