How are you using DPA?

So far I've worked with 3 organizations using DPA so I'll give an overview of how each of them used DPA (EBA):

1. Large investment bank with 3000 Networker clients in UK (30000 globally, mostly Netbackup); we also collected data from tape libraries and possibly switches.  We put in a test system and worked quite closely with the WYSDM guys in configuring it.  We mostly used scheduled reports which we had written ourselves and published daily to a network share; we then used a VB macro in Excel to pull some of the reports together into one email which served as the basis of our daily reporting.  Other than this we mainly used reporting on an ad hoc basis.  Compliance is very important as failure to backup financial data can result in huge fines so the driving force behind EBA was to ensure all data was being backed up and to put anything failing more than 1 day on the radar. There was some interest in some of the monitoring functionality but we never got too deeply into that.

2. European government (3000 clients).  EBA/DPA was used largely on an ad hoc basis by many people to investigate issues and to provide ad hoc reports for management.

3. (At present) Educational services company (500 Networker clients, 500 Commvault clients).  DPA used to provide reports on success rates of backup clients (reports are brought together centrally in Excel with some data being provided by Commvault's own reporting functionality).  I've also written some reports which report things like last successful full/incremental backups, monthly total backup data dashboard, list of recent full backup failures, list of all clients with savesets and retentions etc to assist with troubleshooting.  The main thing I have been putting together is reports to forecast media usage which has been hampered by inconsistent and missing data on the CommVault side (CommVault collectors also are very resource intensive and tend to suck up 50%+ of the processor which does not go down well); since Networker is a legacy app (still running at 7.2) that is like to be phased out towards the middle of the year DPA may also find its days are numbered as CommVault does appear to have good reporting integrated at an additional license cost (though like Networker the standard reporting leaves a lot to be desired).  

So from my experience the main uses seem to be as follows:

* Compliance reporting - producing a report which gives statistics on how much and many was backed up, how much and many wasn't, short term historical data (usually last week or so).  Having a good canned report which does this would add serious value to the product.

* Failure reporting/analysis.  Usually using ad hoc reports to investigate known issues.

* Investigating data and media trends to produce capacity planning data.

Currently DPA is being used by the team of four who run the Tivoli Storage Manager servers and the DataDomain appliances the TSM servers use. When DPA was brought in, there was talk that perhaps the Avamar support team would want to put in their own DPA instance to support the Avamar instances, but that never happened.

We have three goals:

1. Replace home-grown reports formerly used to report on TSM backup clients for things like Sarbanes-Oxley compliance.
2. Generate reports for the backup administrators about the health and status of the 30+ backup servers.
3. Generate alerts for the TSM/DD administrators in nearly real-time in response to ongoing events.

The first goal is mostly accomplished. Every time the Operations department reorganizes and someone new is placed in charge of remediating failed backups, it's back to square 1 on what the reports mean and what the new person wants them to show, but the old home-grown reports have been retired.

The second and third goals haven't been completely met. It's easier for us to whip up a script to run under cron and then e-mail ourselves a simple report on how many scratch tapes we have or how bad the DataDomain backlogs are than it is to figure out how to get DPA to do the same thing. However, as we get questions that are best answered by consulting DPA's historic data (maintained for Sarbanes-Oxley compliance), our DPA skills are slowly improving.

We know there's a lot DPA can do that it's not doing for us. We're not just sure yet if that will solve any problems we have or not.

Nick - thanks for your comments - it sounds like you're just beginning to realize the vast potential DPA has to offer.

DPA has strengths in the areas of automation (auto-generation and distribution of reports), compliance/auditing, proactive alerting re system health checks, trending, predictive analysis and capabity planning, root cause analysis, and much, much more. 

Feel free to leverage the DPA Community to post specific questions to other DPA users, and be assured that DPA experts are listening as well - I'm certain you will quickly receive best practices re how to acheive your goals below and realize how DPA can save you time and effort.

Additionally, should you have support-related questions, you will find much information on DPA at the DPA Support Forum.