For those of us who have been using NetWorker for a very long time, we can remember back to when the NetWorker Management Console didn’t exist. If you wanted reports in those days, you wrote them yourself, either by parsing your savegroup completion results, processing the NetWorker daemon.log, or interrogating mminfo.
Over time since its introduction, NMC has evolved in functionality and usefulness. These days there are still some things that I find easier to do on the command line, but more often than not I find myself reaching for NMC for various administrative functions. Reporting is one of those.
(Just a quick interrupt. The NetWorker Usage Survey is happening again. Every year I ask readers to participate and tell me a bit about their environment. It’s short – I promise! – you only need around 5 minutes to answer the questions. When you’re finished reading this article, I’d really appreciate if you could jump over and do the survey.)
There’s a wealth of reports in NMC, but some of the ones I find particularly useful often end up being:
- User auditing
- Success/failure results and percentages
- Backup volume over time
- Deduplication statistics
In order to get maximum use out of those, you want to make sure those details are kept for as long as you need them. In newer versions of NetWorker, if you go to the Enterprise Console and check out the Reports menu, you’ll see an option labelled “Data Retention”, and the default values are as follows:
Those values are OK for using NMC reporting just for casual checking, but if you’re intending to perform longer-term checking, reporting or compliance based auditing, you might want to extend those values somewhat. Based on conversations with a couple of colleagues, I’m inclined to extend everything except for the Completion Message section to at 3 years in sites where longer-term compliance and auditing reporting is required. The completion messages are generally a little bigger in scope, and I’d be inclined to limit those to 3 months at the most. So that means the resulting fields would look like:
Ultimately the values you set in the NMC Reports Data Retention area should be specific to the requirements of your business, but be certain to check them out and tweak the defaults as necessary to align them with your needs.
(Hey, now you’ve finished reading this article, just a friendly reminder: The NetWorker Usage Survey is happening again. Every year I ask readers to participate and tell me a bit about their environment. It’s short – I promise! – you only need around 5 minutes to answer the questions. When you’re finished reading this article, I’d really appreciate if you could jump over and do the survey.)