Summary

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Advanced Reporting

As we have seen, there are reports for jobs, media, and images. These reports can provide you with most, if not all, of the information you need to manage your backup domain. Unfortunately, there are other reporting needs. Sometimes it is nice to be able to produce graphical reports and to have reports on other parts of the overall backup domain. These advanced reports may be produced in various ways. VERITAS Software offers an option product, NetBackup Advanced Reporter (NBAR), with over 30 different reports. You can also write your own custom Perl scripts that can interface with the program interface in NBAR to produce your own reports. This is a Web-based tool. The available reports help you analyze your NetBackup environment by presenting NetBackup data from four broad viewpoints:

Figure 6.22: Media contents report.

• High-level summaries, which allow you to drill down to the specific trouble spots

• Detailed operational views, including a consolidated error log

• Historical perspective for trend analysis and event/time correlation

• Performance indicators, such as data throughput

Many of these reports can be tailored to provide exactly the information you need. NBAR also includes an online version of the NetBackup Troubleshooting Guide. NBAR gives you a tool that allows you to use the information provided in the NetBackup debug logs without having to manually analyze the text log files. NBAR passively scans the VERITAS NetBackup logs for specific information about each client and copies that information to its own database. It then uses that data to generate reports on NetBackup backup and restore activities, catalog operations, and media usage. Maintaining a separate database allows Advanced Reporter to retain a record of NetBackup activities long after the NetBackup administrator has purged expired backup information from the NetBackup logs.

NBAR consists of the following components:

• A client delivery system that distributes the Java applet GUI to individual browsers

• The Java applet GUI that is started from a browser

• A database server for the NBAR database

• A data collection service

• A configuration utility

NBAR is installed on a NetBackup Data Center master server. The NBAR database server resides on this master server, as do the configuration utility and the client delivery component. NBAR gathers information about the NetBackup environment by running NetBackup commands. NBAR then loads the information gathered into its database. NBAR can be installed and configured on Sun, HP, and Windows master servers. It is also fully integrated with the NetBackup Global Data Manager (GDM), which we discuss in a later chapter. By using NBAR with GDM, you can actually roll up reports from multiple masters to a single global master.

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