{"id":7225,"date":"2018-11-01T19:59:41","date_gmt":"2018-11-01T09:59:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/?p=7225"},"modified":"2018-12-11T07:07:18","modified_gmt":"2018-12-10T21:07:18","slug":"basics-avamar-client-logs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/2018\/11\/01\/basics-avamar-client-logs\/","title":{"rendered":"Basics \u2013 Avamar Client Logs"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>If you&#8217;re new to Avamar, you might not know that the Avamar backup agent writes a lot of useful information to the client logs. In this post, I&#8217;m going to run through a few bits of information that I find particularly useful when looking through an Avamar backup agent log.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/11\/Log-Analysis.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-7226\" src=\"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/11\/Log-Analysis.jpg\" alt=\"Log Analysis\" width=\"900\" height=\"601\" srcset=\"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/11\/Log-Analysis.jpg 900w, https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/11\/Log-Analysis-300x200.jpg 300w, https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/11\/Log-Analysis-768x513.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 900px) 100vw, 900px\" \/><\/a>On a default install on Linux, you&#8217;ll find the logs written into <strong>\/usr\/local\/avamar\/var\/clientlogs<\/strong>. (It&#8217;ll be a similar scenario for an NDMP accelerator, as well. On Windows for a default install, check out&nbsp;<strong>C:\\Program Files\\avs\\var\\clientlogs<\/strong>). Looking in that directory, you&#8217;ll find a number of files \u2013 on the test01 server I setup <strong><a href=\"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/2018\/10\/26\/avamar-18-1-a-stellar-interface\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">in an earlier blog post<\/a><\/strong>, a directory listing looks like:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/11\/Log-Listing.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-7227\" src=\"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/11\/Log-Listing.png\" alt=\"Log Listing\" width=\"760\" height=\"507\" srcset=\"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/11\/Log-Listing.png 760w, https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/11\/Log-Listing-300x200.png 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 760px) 100vw, 760px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>You&#8217;ll notice there&#8217;s pairs of logs generated during backups, .log and .alg. It&#8217;s the&nbsp;<em>.log<\/em> file I want to pull a few details out here today. Now you can pull a lot of logging information out of the Avamar GUI, but I&#8217;ve always liked to be able to drill down in via the command line as well, and there&#8217;s segments of data I find quite useful. Backup logs are written with naming details reflective of the retention period, policy and schedule they were generated for. You&#8217;ll see some backup logs in that listing starting with <strong>MOD<\/strong> \u2013 <em>Manual-On-Demand<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>The start of the log file for a backup will run through some of the initial connectivity information \u2013 the Avamar server, the command line arguments that&nbsp;<em>avtar<\/em> was called with, exclusion details, etc. You&#8217;ll then see information indicating a successful connection from the client to the Avamar server, such as:<\/p>\n<pre>2018-11-01 16:00:11 avtar Info &lt;5550&gt;: Successfully logged into Avamar Server [18.1.0-33] (Compression enabled)\n2018-11-01 16:00:11 avtar Info &lt;7563&gt;: Back up of \"\/\" on server \"kronos.turbamentis.int\" for \/clients\/test01.turbamentis.int<\/pre>\n<p>Looking through the log, it identified one gotcha in my lab setup \u2013 I&#8217;d forgotten to lock down the Avamar server to only backing up to Data Domain. That&#8217;s something that&#8217;s done by default when working through an Avamar implementation (and why I don&#8217;t do implementations!) Why I know that is when you&#8217;re backing up a Data Domain, you&#8217;ll see information logged about the Client&lt;&gt;DD connection, such as:<\/p>\n<pre>2018-11-01 19:04:50 avtar Info &lt;40062&gt;: GSAN connected via: IPv4, retrieved Data Domain IPv4 hostname = singularity.turbamentis.int\n2018-11-01 19:04:50 avtar Info &lt;10539&gt;: Connecting to Data Domain Server \"singularity.turbamentis.int\"(1) (LSU: avamar-1516143927) with auth token\n2018-11-01 19:04:50 avtar Info &lt;10540&gt;: - Resolved Data Domain Server name \"singularity.turbamentis.int\" to the IP address \"192.168.100.249\"\n2018-11-01 19:04:50 avtar Info &lt;41236&gt;: - Connecting to Data Domain Server name \"singularity.turbamentis.int\" with token:094e4343d013a88d69bb6ed25230d3e9375d4674<\/pre>\n<p>(That logging, clearly, comes from a new backup I&#8217;d executed after correcting my error.)<\/p>\n<p>After that, the Avamar log reports the file and hash cache files being opened:<\/p>\n<pre>2018-11-01 16:00:11 avtar Info &lt;5586&gt;: Loading cache files from \/usr\/local\/avamar\/var\n2018-11-01 16:00:11 avtar Info &lt;8650&gt;: Opening filename cache file '\/usr\/local\/avamar\/var\/f_cache.dat'\n2018-11-01 16:00:11 avtar Info &lt;5573&gt;: - Loaded filename cache file (92,275,232 bytes), the value maybe the same as previous backups.\n2018-11-01 16:00:11 avtar Info &lt;8650&gt;: Opening hash cache file '\/usr\/local\/avamar\/var\/p_cache.dat'\n2018-11-01 16:00:11 avtar Info &lt;5573&gt;: - Loaded hash cache file (100,663,840 bytes), the value maybethe same as previous backups.\n2018-11-01 16:00:12 avtar Info &lt;6426&gt;: Done loading cache files<\/pre>\n<p>When the backup completes you&#8217;ll see a wrap-up message:<\/p>\n<pre>2018-11-01 16:05:41 avtar Info &lt;5163&gt;: Backup complete, wrapping-up session with Server<\/pre>\n<p>Just a little above the wrap up message, you&#8217;ll see a line that tells you the percentage change encountered between this backup and the last:<\/p>\n<pre>2018-11-01 16:05:41 avtar Info &lt;5156&gt;: Backup #9 timestamp 2018-11-01 16:05:31, 964,577 files, 29,940 directories, 24.17 GB (28 files, 157.4 KB, 0.00% new)<\/pre>\n<p>In this case, because the test system was pretty much inactive between backups, there was only a tiny about of new content \u2013 enough for Avamar to round it to effectively 0.00%, which makes sense when only 157.4KB had changed on a 24.17GB backup. Here&#8217;s an example of output where more new files were discovered, after I generated some new random content on the system:<\/p>\n<pre>2018-11-01 19:32:51 avtar Info &lt;5156&gt;: Backup #11 timestamp 2018-11-01 19:32:40, 1,038,297 files, 32,514 directories, 25.25 GB (67,776 files, 995.9 MB, 3.85% new)<\/pre>\n<p>(In that case, there was almost 1GB of new data, representing about a 3.85% change from the previous backup.)<\/p>\n<p>Now, after the wrap-up message I&#8217;d previously mentioned, you&#8217;ll see information logged giving you the other key statistics of the backup \u2013 such as:<\/p>\n<pre>2018-11-01 16:05:41 avtar Info &lt;6083&gt;: Backed-up 24.17 GB in 5.52 minutes: 263 GB\/hour (10,487,183 files\/hour)<\/pre>\n<p>Overall, those are pretty good statistics of course, telling you deduplication is well and truly happening: 24.17 GB backed up in under 6 minutes, a speed of 263 GB per hour, with a file processing equivalent of almost 10.5 million files per hour.<\/p>\n<p>As you can see, there&#8217;s a lot of information you can pull out of an Avamar client log, and it&#8217;s always worth while keeping those files in mind as part of operational or fault analysis.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>If you&#8217;re new to Avamar, you might not know that the Avamar backup agent writes a lot of useful information&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1154,6],"tags":[1486,550],"class_list":["post-7225","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-avamar-2","category-basics","tag-avtar","tag-logs"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pKpIN-1Sx","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7225","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7225"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7225\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7333,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7225\/revisions\/7333"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7225"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7225"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7225"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}