Do you CLI ? Would you prefer not to...

Hi Skip,

While a picture may be worth a thousand words, a GUI is not a replacement to a thousand command line options.

IMHO I think it actually detracts from NetWorker to try to port all the functionality of the CLI into NMC. The aim should be that for any command that has "simple" and "advanced" functionality, the simple functionality should be mirrored in NMC, but advanced functionality works best at the CLI. In particular, reducing everything to NMC (i.e., potentially taking away CLI) strips a great deal of extensibility out of a product. In particular, by being a framework, NetWorker can easily adapted to work within environments that don't necessarily conform to engineering labs, etc. Automation in particular is something that is savagely lost in a GUI-only product.

So while I'd agree there are some things that should be updated within the GUI to better approach CLI functionality, it shouldn't be seen as a "CLI is bad" approach.

My favourite update would be to fix NMC's device/jukebox creation functionality. This is somewhat basic - can't handle library sharing environments, gives up in a lot of scenarios. It would be better if instead it actually offered a wizard-style approach of Q&A when it can't auto-build so as to not bomb out at the first sign of trouble.

An example of something that could be done in the GUI but not easily via a command line would be to have NMC optionally report on the SSIDs in progress in staging and cloning operations. I.e., be able to say, double-click on a device that's writing 4 sessions, and see what SSIDs(/CloneIDs) are being written.

The biggest bonus though would come from integrating client GUI backup and recovery operations within NMC. That way administrators would have recovery GUIs regardless of their platform, and backup GUIs could remain reasonably tightly integrated with NMC look & feel.

Cheers,

Preston.

Hey Preston,

  I agree with you, that is why I try to follow the 80/20 rule. Providing 80% of the functionality for a given CLI in the GUI covers most of

our users needs. And prevents having to leave the UI to accomplish something you should be able to do where you are.

  Of course the level of user expertise is always part of the equation. Experts users like yourself are comfortable with the tools we

have had for years. Newer users find them confusing and difficult to learn and retain.

  We will never port all of the CLI functionality to NMC, as you say it wouldn't make sense. I want to capture that 80% sweet spot and

I am looking for a starting place. Thank you again for the feedback...always know I can count on you.

Cheers,

Skip

Hi,

I'm pretty sure I use mminfo 100% of the time to locate backups, and never really trusted GUI to configure jukeboxes. Scanner is very simple to use, so I guess it could be included in the GUI without any problems.

I learned that every customer has VERY different needs, so it's almost impossible to live without some scripting, and then CLI is everything you have. Mminfo, nsrinfo and nsradmin really help.

I used to work a lot with nsradmin to have reports on what is configured in my environment, and I would love to have a report about configurations in the GUI

Scanner might be nice in the GUI.

But as for command line... when is SysAdmin API (python interface) going to be available for customers?

the 80/20 rule is that 80% of the total functionality should be in the GUI. There are just things that are stupid to do in the GUI.

Most common command I use? nsradmin. I can do naughty things with that :-)

Sometimes, stringing commands together to create policies that you don't have in the GUI, although you've started doing some of that now.

before you joined, Skip, there was a user survey of people that tried NetWorker and NetBackup. if the products were reviewed for less than 6 weeks, NB won. (This is in teh days of the old X and Windows forms based UI's), more than that, NW tended to win. Why? because nW had more functionality, but before 6 weeks it was about point and click.

Sure, in these days of Gen Y, etc coming out of short pants and being in the business word, A good GUI is very important. They are great for certain things.... but nothing beats a fantastic CLI.... except maybe an API ;-)

Hi Skip.

We sometimes have to recover data that has browsetime that has expired. Then the clients of the NetWorker backup system either can do a save set recovery which is not nice if you need granular restore. Or, the client of the NetWorker backup system can contact the administrator of the enterprise backup system that NetWorker is. That administrator can then use his CLI power to change the browsetime and rebuild index with nsrck L7.

It would do so much for NetWorker if this functionality could be made simple in the GUI of NMC. Even better, if it was possible to do this from the client GUI e.g. winworkr. That is, select save set recovery, and ask for it to be indexed from the program of the client.

Johannes

Excellent feedback everyone. Just a quick reply to let everybody know I am reading these and taking notes. Interesting comment Siobhan about Netbackup and NetWorker. My goal is to not only grab the user but hold on to them as well.

Keep it coming...

Thank you again,

Skip

I have a very large and diverse environment, and the cli is pretty crucial in running our operation.

The two commands I use most frequently - nsradmin and mminfo. I've been doing this for some time now, so I've got used to their quirky ways, but it was a long and painful initiation into the the Black Art, especially for nsradmin. I use them in two ways. Firstly to automate our daily tasks, running backups from our external scheduler, handling the cloning, collecting stats, that sort of thing. Then there is the "ad hoc queries" aspect, for example where I need to find out how many Oracle modules do we have running on how many hosts across a number of NW servers.

Things I hate about nsradmin:

Difficult to form queries and rubbish wildcarding

Difficult and tedious to use returned results (why oh why can't it return the data in columns? Is it really that hard?)

Things I like about nsradmin:

Ability to get information from multiple NW servers in one script

Ability to get right in there at the heart of NW, and see what is in the database rather than what NMC showed me

Ability to collect lots of information quickly

The first use implies embedding the cli function into a script, which is obviously not something that can be put into a gui. The second type of use could be NMC-ized. I'm visualising here some sort of window in NMC that has two panes, in the top one you form your query by selecting from a number of options ie nsradmin fields, in the bottom one you collect the results in neat columns, with the possibilty of exporting the data to a spreadsheet. So it looks a little like a "Query" in MS Access, or your favourite database developer front-end. And perhaps we could have a "Reports" function too, which would be laid out in a fashion suitable for printing.

Or perhaps we could have a API for the database...

You have to get customers to hold on to them.

I had this discussion with Richard Reitmeyer (Sp?) at EMC World. His view was completely implement in CLI first, then implement in GUI. My view is you can lead with the CLI, as the functions tend to be advanced usage, but you should put into the GUI ASAP, and certainly should not just concentrate on the CLI. However, i do believe that one of the strengths of NetWorker is its complete CLI, so I'm not advocating functionality in the GUi that is not in the CLI.

In these days of increased pressure for the same, or less, people to do more, the GUI should be easy to use and provide as much functionality as possible. You should be looking at the 80/20 rule as a guide. basically, unless it is esoteric, you should be able to do it in the GUI. Quite simply, unless it is a special request, I do not have the time to sit down and work my way through weird switch combinations on the command line.

Hi Skip,

I have to admit that NMC has been a great boon to keeping Networker running smoothly, and it looks like 7.6 has even given back some of the longed for nwadmin type view of the world!

The CLI.... In my environment, I've got a little shell script menu based system which contains commands to run the vast majority of the Operational tasks that the system requires. Setting the system up this way allows me to remove a lot of the potential for finger trouble on the part of our Operators.

I've also got some scripts using nsradmin which trawl through the configurations looking for oddities, and configurations which don't match the rules for our system. This sort of thing would be immensely difficult to deal with in a GUI, as each customer will have a different set of "correct configurations" that they want to be applied in the system.

Then there are changes that I want to make at a scheduled time (such as altering which tape drives are available from which of the Drive-Sharing hosts).

Some good things - It looks as if the recent versions of nsrclone may have addressed a large chunk of the issues that we all had to script around in previous versions - Thank you!

Some bad things - (echoing Claire) the nightmare that is "scripting for nsradmin". I know Richard has his Python API, which should help if you're coding in Python... I've got a long term thought about putting together a Perl Module that would deal with interfacing to nsradmin, so that the munging can all be done once, whichever type of resource you're working with (and if I get there, I'll share it with the world!)

Keep up the good work.

From

Will Parsons

I'm late to the party here, but I'll add my 2p-worth from the UK. We have a large environment and I use CLI every day. Mminfo and nsradmin are probably the most used commands. We use a lot of scripts for tape management etc, so having some kind of CLI (unless Networker adds our script functionality) is essential.

I've done some work with Commvault Galaxy, which set out to be entirely GUI driven. It works, but it has so many tick boxes and context sensitive menus that it makes it even harder to use.

In my experience of supporting customer who use Networker, there was a sort of weird 80/20 20/80 split. In the Windows world, around 80% of folks didn't use the CLI unless forced to at gunpoint. In the Unix world it was the other way around. This may say more about the type of people using the product than the the product itself!

Phil

I use the command line pretty much for everything. Every major operation I do has been distilled down into a wrapper around nsradmin or an mminfo query.

Jason.

mminfo, nsradmin, nsrjb and nsrmm are part and parcel of my regular day's work.

I wish the GUI has a filter/searchable query which makes it easier to find clients/pools/tapes and their (selectable) associated information. But till then, it's CLI all the way...

Most used CLIs in my case are mminfo and nsradmin.  First one is kind of already in NMC, but I never use it as I trust more speedier CLI.  Second in GUI would no longer be nsradmin so I vote to leave it as it is.  However, I do like suggestion by one thread participant who mentioned nsrck (to recover index) which should be part of the GUI.  I would (and I guess many others) welcome that idea.

Will,

  Hello. Could you give me an example of "configuration oddities" you are trawling for ? I am interested in knowing how you are checking your configuration in nsradmin to your configuration rules. The designer in me is thinking...it would be cool to give you an interface to define your rules and then we do the checking for you and either prevent invalid configurations or alert you when someone breaks the rules. You know, being more proactive, than reactive.

Cheers,

Skip

NetWorker Usability