Did you know...

One of the best ways to efficiently and easily manage your backup environment is to generate a report on what is happening.

How Does Reporting Help Manage My Backup Environment?

Way back when, if you wanted to confirm your Service Level Agreements it took a lot of time! The only way to determine whether your backups were meeting SLAs was to use the basic text reporting functionality to export the data, then import the data into various Excel spreadsheets, manipulate the data and hope that the results would appear. 

Years ago, as a backup administrator, I got quite familiar with this process. I had extra reason to dread Mondays because I would spend most of the day trying to figure out if backup recovery time objectives (RTO) could be met, as well as to confirm whether recovery point objectives (RPO) were met for over 1000 backup clients. And of course, I was spending this time on spreadsheet review, instead of resolving the reasons the RPOs and RTOs were not met.

And, if the backups did fail, it meant even more time would be spent investigating and figuring out exactly which backup caused the failures and then looking more closely to spot any patterns to these failures, any of which could impact the whole backup regime and SLAs.  

Thankfully, there is now a solution to these reporting issues and so many more. I just wish I had these options back in the day.

Thank Goodness for Reporting Server

With the release of Data Protector 10.10, Micro Focus introduced their new Reporting Server for capacity-based license customers. The release of Data Protector 10.70 introduced us to Reporting Server—a feature for customers who are still using our traditional-based license model.  Reporting Server provides analytics, data reporting, and data monitoring which enables you to identify protection gaps, run a rapid root-cause analysis for issues, and now allows backup administrators to plan for future backup resources. 

With this in mind let’s look at these new features and how Reporting Server can quickly provide the results so you can know if SLAs have been met. 

From the Home tab click Reports > RTO/RPO Configuration and then choose the RTO and RPO you desire on a per-server level, click Search and that’s it!

Figure 1 - RTO/RPO Configuration

After you have defined these SLAs, select either of the RTO or RPO reports under the Compliance Reports section, and you will see which of your servers failed to meet their SLAs.

Figure 2 - Recovery Point Objective

Not only is it quick and easy to find out which of your servers completed a backup up in the required time, but with just one click, you can see which of your clients and backup specifications are the least reliable. This information enables you to spend time fixing the issues, versus trying to figure out which clients and specifications are failing.

Figure 3 - Most Unreliable Backup Specification

Although these three reports can make the life of a backup administrator so much easier, don’t forget that there are another 70+ reports included in the Reporting Server, such as…

• Charge Back
• Session Statistics
• Backup Success
• Media Usage
• Object Operations
• Deduplication Ratios

If you have access to Reporting Server, please take some time to work with it and let us know what you think of the reported results.

For more information on Data Backup and Resiliency, click on over to our site.

The Micro Focus IM&G team

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