simple email notification about backup state

Under tools -> Profiles

you can create custom profiles to alert you on different actions. I would start there.

Once you edit the profile on the Properities tab there are 2 options:

Email Events as they occur

Email Events on a schedule

it's one or the other.. So choose wisely...

yes, i know the profiles. But some events like success backups or timed out backups do not have event/error codes. in this case no message will be generated

Cheers

Kai

I would suggest you use the MCS database views.  If you have some skill with SQL and/or Access, it is worth your time and effort to start using the views to create reports.

Hi,

> I would suggest you use the MCS database views.  If you have some skill with SQL and/or Access,

> it is worth your time and effort to start using the views to create reports.

Yes, another possibility is to involve SQL language from CLI .
I mean to build your custom sql queries, involve CRON to get reports and sent it then per mail ...

1.)  to user PostgreSQL interface and connect on it ....
  # psql -p 5555 -U viewuser mcdb

<< snip >>
root@dpn:~/#: su - admin
admin@dpn:~/>: psql -p 5555 -U viewuser mcdb
Welcome to psql 8.2.3, the PostgreSQL interactive terminal.

mcdb=>

Note:  Please use "viewuser" (read only) account for your queries !

2.) Herre is the example for a simple SQL query, but you can build your own queries and export it as plain text .

    SELECT * FROM "public"."v_clients";
    SELECT v_clients.cid, v_clients.client_name, v_clients.client_addr,v_clients.os_type FROM "public"."v_clients";

regards,

.R

I have a couple of timed-out backups in my activity list and they do not show a code. However if you open the session and parse through the text there is an event code inside. I would configure on that event.

For instance mine is: 10019

And I have another that Timed Out but it was only a warning and that code was: 5598

The codes are there you may just have to dig for them a bit.

hello and thanks to all. i finish the discussion with the quick statement: a simple and quick implemented notification of backup status per email is not possible, like in other tools

best regards

kai

That is a joke, right? Wth.... ? I am coming off networker, and you are saying avamar, a product that cost as much if not more, cannot achieve the same (albeit, lame) level of functionality? (Im finding it difficult, but have not given up yet. it's 12/2010. surely there is a way?  No?

This is not good.

Customers really like to have some easy monitoring off their backup status (successful and failed jobs) and the easiest way would be email.
Every product can do that.

We tried to achieve this with profiles and special reports but Avamar doesn't send anything. But when you select the report and run it, it shows the necessary info. However when you test the profile it sends an empty mail. Whether it is with csv, txt or xml, we only see some headers but no  real info about the status.

Steven

> This is not good.

> Customers really like to have some easy monitoring off their backup status (successful and failed jobs)

> and the easiest way would be email.   Every product can do that.

You could maybe give a try with Data Protection Advisor .

> We tried to achieve this with profiles and special reports but Avamar doesn't send anything.

could you provide us more infornation regarding this one ... regarding your special reports ... I suppose scripts ... etc ..

> But when you select the report and run it, it shows the necessary info. However when you test the profile

> it sends an empty mail. Whether it is with csv, txt or xml, we only see some headers but no  real info about the status.

It must be something wrong you performed ...  please more information here and I will be glad to share my knowledge ...

regards,

Rej

First of all thanks for the follow-up.

It is a very small customer environment (Hotel) and he primarilyd use to backup its remote sites.

Therefor I don’t want to push a DPA installation and setup.

Personnally I find a product of this range (and price) should be able to do this without using a second product.

For the reports, there are no special scripts. Simply the standard reports of Avamar. We created a report which should simply sum up the successful clients and another one with the failed clients after each backup. When we launch the report via the Avamar Gui it works fine but when we try the profile and email, it sends the email but empty (empty csv, empty txt with only headers and not the information it showed in the report).

I will try to get some examples from the customer.

Hello Said,

Maybe you could use PostgreSQL ANSI ODBC Driver (psqlODBC) to connect to Avamar server (with the following information below) and run standard or your custom Avamar reports directely to the Microsoft Excel .

=================

Data Source: MCDatabase

Database: mcdb

Server:

Port: 5555
User Name: viewuser

Password: viewuser1

=================

Please let me know if you need assistence here ...

regards,

Rej

If your email reports are coming through "empty", have you verified your SMTP server is not munging them, and that sendmail is properly configured on your avamar utility node?

I'm still not so impressed on the email alerting stuff - DPA is not a real solution here, it's another management headache...

Hacking into postgres for anything to do with Avamar is also a joke / non-answer.

Can anyone from EMC address how this is going to be fixed in the future, or if it's simply "We don't care" as it seems to be now?

cheers,

James

"We tried to achieve this with profiles and special reports but Avamar  doesn't send anything. But when you select the report and run it, it  shows the necessary info. However when you test the profile it sends an  empty mail."

I've never tried this before, but I ran a few tests on my Avamar, and I experienced the same thing.

It IS possible to get quick email notification of nightly backups.  Notice I didn't necessarily say easy but that depends on your scripting abilities.

The first method is using reports and profiles that are emailed and must be opened in s spreadsheet which I found rather cumbersome.  I got around this problem by writing scripts that performed SQL queries which summerizes ONLY the data I want to see for Daily replications and backups and are emailed to me.  I can look these over in about 10 minutes and determine if anything unsual happened that requires further analysis.  I also went a step further writing other scripts which selects the failures from these summary reports and forwards them to our trouble ticketing system.

The SQL part is not as difficult as it looks as the SQL queries used by the Avamar reports themselves are on the systems.  You can pretty much look at these and get the query you need.

float wrote: yes, i know the profiles. But some events like success backups or timed out backups do not have event/error codes. in this case no message will be generated

you should look at the status_code_summary of v_activities_2

the codes are all in the 30000 range

30000=completed

30005=completed with exceptions

anything else=fail