Monitoring with DPM Administrator Console

Article
05/17/2011

Applies To: System Center Data Protection Manager 2010

To use DPM Administrator Console, you must be logged on to a DPM server with an account that has Administrator rights on that server.

This section explains each of the following task areas of DPM Administrator Console and describes the information that each provides:

Monitoring task area
Protection task area
Management task area
Reporting task area

Note

You do not need to monitor each task area in DPM Administrator Console. For more information, see Establishing a Monitoring Schedule.

Monitoring Task Area

The Monitoring task area contains two tabs: Jobs and Alerts.

For monitoring purposes, the Alerts tab provides the more critical information. You should check the Alerts tab daily to provide timely resolution of issues that might be preventing successful protection of data.

Monitoring Task Area: Alerts

What do you look for on the Alerts tab?

Current problems (critical alerts)
Potential problems (warning alerts)
Important activity (informational alerts)
Recommended actions

The Alerts tab displays errors, warnings, and informational messages. You can group alerts by protection group, computer, or severity. You can also choose to display active alerts exclusively or to display both active alerts and inactive alerts (alerts that have been resolved). You can also subscribe to notifications to receive alerts sent by e-mail.

DPM ensures that the Alerts tab reflects the set of issues that are currently active in the system. When the issue that generated an alert is corrected, the alert becomes inactive. In fact, many issues reported as alerts never require your intervention at all, either because they reflect temporary conditions or because they are self-correcting. For example, an alert that indicates that the DPM server is unable to contact a protected computer might result from a transient network issue; the subsequent attempt might be successful. In some cases, DPM automatically designates an informational alert as inactive after a predefined period of time. A "Recovery collection completed successfully" alert, for example, becomes inactive three days after the recovery is completed.

DPM enables you to mark alerts as inactive. Marking alerts as inactive can be done for a variety of reasons, such as when the alert is no longer meaningful or if you do not plan to resolve the alert. For example, you see failure alerts for the past three days for a data source that is configured for daily backups to tape. You decide to rerun only the latest failed backup job. In this situation, you might want to mark the alerts for the previous failures as inactive.

When you mark an alert as inactive, the protection status for the protection group will change to OK in DPM Administrator Console and in the DPM Management Pack.

For more information, see the Resolving Alerts (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=196772) in DPM 2010 Help.

As a general guideline, we recommend that you do the following:

View active alerts when you want to focus on active, current issues.
Use inactive alerts as a source of information when you want to identify trends or analyze issues.
Mark alerts as inactive only when you are sure that you need not address the issue.

Note

Marking an alert as inactive should be evaluated on a case-by-case basis and should not be done except when absolutely necessary.

Monitoring Task Area: Jobs

What do you look for on the Jobs tab?

When jobs ran
When jobs are scheduled to run
Which jobs of a specific type are scheduled
Which jobs are scheduled for a protected computer
Which jobs are scheduled for a protection group
Which jobs did not complete successfully and why
How long jobs took to run
The amount of data transferred for a job
Number of files scanned during a consistency check
Which tape and library resources were used

The Jobs tab displays the status of jobs. You can group jobs by protection group, computer, status, or type. You can also create filters to customize the view of jobs according to any combination of job parameters.

Detailed information for each job is available only on the Jobs tab in the Details pane. Detailed information about job failures can be useful for advanced troubleshooting.

You can choose to include regularly scheduled synchronization operations in the list of jobs. However, it is not necessary to monitor synchronization jobs regularly because any problems will be reported on the Alerts tab.

Protection Task Area

What do you look for in the Protection task area?

Status of volumes and shares in each protection group
Configuration of each protection group, such as recovery goals, disk allocation, and protection schedule

The Protection task area provides the status of each protected item.

Management Task Area

The Management task area contains three tabs: Disks, Agents, and Libraries.

Management Task Area: Disks

What do you look for on the Disks tab?

Capacity of disks in the storage pool (used and free space)
Status of disks in the storage pool
Which protected volumes are contained on each disk

The Disks tab displays a list of disks included in the storage pool, and it enables you to add and remove disks from the pool.

Management Task Area: Agents

What do you look for on the Agents tab?

Version of deployed agents
Status of deployed agents
Availability of agent licenses

The Agents tab displays a list of protection agents deployed on computers, and it enables you to install, uninstall, and update the agents and to update licenses.

Management Task Area: Libraries

What do you look for on the Libraries tab?

State of the tape libraries and stand-alone tape drives
Status of individual tapes

The Libraries tab displays a list of libraries and tape drives attached to the DPM server, and it enables you to inventory, add, and remove tapes.

Reporting Task Area

What can you do in the Reporting task area?

Generate and view reports on DPM operations.
Schedule automatic report generation.
Manage Reporting Services settings.
Subscribe to reports by e-mail.

DPM uses Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services as the basis for its reporting functionality. SQL Server Reporting Services includes a Report Manager tool that is not installed during DPM installation. Because settings made through Report Manager can create conflicts with DPM settings, we recommend that you do not install the Report Manager tool that is included with SQL Server Reporting Services.

You can enable the DPM reporting feature at any time after installing and configuring DPM. However, to ensure that DPM has enough information to generate meaningful report data, we recommend that you wait at least a day after starting data protection activities to begin viewing reports. For instructions to help you enable DPM reporting, see Using Reports (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=196780) in DPM 2010 Help.

Note

When a DPM server is protecting a large number of computers, you should stagger the delivery schedule for reports sent by e-mail. If you schedule all reports to be sent at the same time, the memory limitations of SQL Server Reporting Services might prevent some reports from being sent.

The following table summarizes the available reports and indicates how you should use them. For information about interpreting the data in reports, see Report Types (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=196781) in DPM 2010 Help.

DPM Reports

Report Name	Summary of Contents
Status	The Status report provides the status of all recovery points for a specified time period, lists recovery jobs, and shows the total number of successes and failures for recovery points and disk-based and tape-based recovery point creations. This report shows trends in the frequency of errors that occur and lists the number of alerts. Use this report to answer questions such as the following: What happened yesterday? Last week? Last month? What succeeded and what failed? What is the trend of errors? Which errors occur most frequently? Are we achieving the recovery point objective (RPO) established in our service level agreement (SLA)? Note The Status report includes the error codes for any alerts recorded during the report period. To view the error message associated with an error code, see the DPM 2010 Error Code Catalog (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=179174).
Tape Management	The Tape Management report provides details for tape rotation and decommissioning, and it verifies that the free media threshold is not exceeded. Use this report to manage tape circulation between the library and your offsite location.
Tape Utilization	The Tape Utilization report provides trending of resource (disk/tape) usage over time to assist capacity planning. Use this report to make decisions about tape allocations and purchases.
Protection	The Protection report provides the commonly used metrics for backup success rolled up over long periods of time to track how backups are doing. Use this report to identify which computers or protection groups have been backed up successfully.
Recovery	The Recovery report provides the commonly used metrics for recovery success rolled up over long periods of time to track how recoveries are doing. Use this report to identify how well you performed against your service level agreements for recovery time objectives and recovery success guarantees.
Disk Utilization	Summarizes disk capacity, disk allocation, and disk usage in the DPM storage pool. Use this report to do the following: Identify trends in disk usage Make decisions about modifying space allocations for protection groups and adding disks to the storage pool Identifying how much disk resource each computer is using on DPM