Centralized Management in DPM for System Center 2012

When you use the centralized management solution, you can monitor all your DPM servers from a single location. In the Central Console, you can monitor the health of the various DPM resources like DPM server, protected computers, tape libraries, available disk space, and more. The Central Console also tracks the various tasks inDPM, like whether recovery points are being taken at the scheduled times, or whether a server is still on the network.

If you have a smaller setup with about five to ten DPM servers, you can use Remote Administration to manage your DPM server centrally. Remote administration is basically the DPM Administrator Console on your computer. Use the remote Administrator Console to connect to and work on any DPM server.

You do not have to be a DPM administrator to use the Remote Administrator Console, just as long as your account is configured on Operations Manager for System Center 2012.

Caution
You cannot set end-user recovery options from the remote Administrator Console. This must be done on the DPM Administrator Console.

Alert consolidation helps unclutter your Alerts tab and work on high priority items. DPM Central Console consolidates alerts in three cases:

• If the alert occurs repeatedly, only one alert is generated on the Central Console. If a job is scheduled to run hourly and hasn’t run for the last ten hours, only one alert for the failed job is displayed in the Central Console instead of ten. On the DPM Administrator Console, the behavior is unchanged.
  
  
• If the root cause for multiple alerts is the same, or if multiple backups for the same data source have failed, only the alert informing you of the failure is generated.
  
  
• If you are using a ticketing system, consolidation of similar alerts means that only one ticket is generated.
  
  

You can resolve the alerts in different ways depending on the type of alert.

• Resume backups: If your backups are failing due to a cause that you have fixed or resolved, click Resume backups. The backup will start, and the alert will be resolved.
  
  
• Take recommended action: If there is a clear recommended action that can resolve your issue, click this option, and Central Console will trigger the action.
  
  
• Troubleshooting: For more complicated issues, you can use the scoped Administrator Console.
  
  

Caution

The time of creation of a recovery point is stored in the Operations Manager Data Warehouse in UTC time. When you create a report, you must convert the time to your time zone to get the right time. For example, if a recovery point was created at 01:00 P.M. 7/19/2011 on the protected computer, DPM pushes this as 1AM 7/19 to Operations Manager. Assuming that the Operations Manager server is in the Pacific Time zone, this will be store as 9AM 7/19. During report creation, you must convert the time back to get the actual time.

The scoped Administrator Console is the administrator’s best friend. The scoped console is based on the DPM Administrator Console with a few very noticeable changes:

• The title bar provides you with information such as ticket number, alert, and DPM server for which the alert is generated.
  
  
• The context bar gives you more details about the alert and where it is generated.
  
  
• The console is scoped to only show those objects for which the alert is generated.
  
  

  Note
  The scoped console also displays tasks that are not associated with any protection group or server because the jobs are common across all objects.