Monitoring DPM Operations

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Published : September 27, 2005

Now that the DPM deployment is complete, you are responsible for managing the day-to-day operations of the DPM servers. Your primary concerns, of course, are to ensure that data is being protected successfully and that protected data can be recovered. These tasks are part of the service management functions that occur in the “Operating” and “Supporting” MOF quadrants, as shown in Figure 1.1. The main goals of service monitoring and control are to observe the health of IT services and initiate remedial actions to minimize the impact of service incidents and system events.

Although you know that you can review the status of data protection jobs by opening DPM Administrator Console on each DPM server and viewing the Alerts tab in the Monitoring task area to see if there are any alerts, you decide to automate this recommended daily monitoring task. To do that, you subscribe to e-mail notifications for critical and warning alerts. The DPM server generates e-mail notifications and sends them through an SMTP server to the addresses and distribution lists that you specify. You automatically receive an e-mail notification for each critical and warning alert.

To meet your IT service level agreement (SLA), you want to handle critical alerts immediately, so you set up rules in Microsoft Outlook to manage the incoming notifications. You send all DPM notifications to a specific folder and flag the critical notifications. When you receive notification of a critical alert, you take the action needed to resolve it.

Each week, you examine the informational alerts that were generated so you can identify trends and potential problems. You glance at the status of all protection groups in the Protection task area in DPM Administrator Console, even though you have already received individual notifications when protection groups were experiencing problems.

The Northwind Traders IT department plans to deploy Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 (MOM) in the domain next year. You are looking forward to the MOM implementation because then you will be able to centrally monitor all DPM servers by using the Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager 2006 (DPM) Management Pack.

Relevant Documentation:

You refer to DPM Help (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=46350) for step-by-step instructions on:

For tips on developing your monitoring schedule and guidance on locating information, you refer to the “Monitoring DPM” chapter in this guide (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=46365). You also use that chapter to help you configure Outlook filtering rules to make your e-mail notifications easier to manage.

For information on using the DPM Management Pack, you refer to the Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager 2006 Management Pack Guide (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=43706).