OpsCenter Basics – Why Aren’t You Using It?

This is a SELF-GUIDED LAB if you prefer. You are welcome to get started and leave when you are finished, or you can play with the OC instance to gain more knowledge. The instructor will also be walking through this lab on the main screen.

Description Take a look at what OpsCenter reporting, monitoring and alerting can do for you. Everything in this lab is included with your NetBackup license – so essentially it is free to use if you are a NetBackup customer.

There are no prerequisites for this lab except a basic understanding of NetBackup.

While this is a guided lab, and we will be going over it step by step with an instructor, it is designed to be self-paced so that the Lab can be run to help get you up to speed when you return home from the conference.

We are using OpsCenter 7.6 Beta II code for this lab therefore if you currently run OpsCenter a few things may look different from what you are used to. NetBackup and OpsCenter 7.6 are slated for release this year.

At the end of this lab, you should be able to

Understand OpsCenter navigation

Be able to use the built in “Point and Click Reports” either default or by customizing them

Gain an understanding of the most popular report options

Know how to configure Alerting to proactively notify you about problems in your environment

Save, schedule, and share reports you’ve created.

Understand the concept of Views, when to use them, and how to create them

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Notes A brief PPT presentation will introduce this lab session and discuss key concepts on how OpsCenter can help you meet your data protection goals.

The lab will be self-guided if you desire, or you are free to wait for the instructor to walk you through each of the Exercises.

If you would like a soft copy of the HOL Guide you can email the instructor – Dave High – at dave_high@symantec.com. That way you can walk through these items in your own environment to gain more OpsCenter knowledge.

Be sure to ask your instructor or lab helpers any questions you may have.

Thank you for coming to our lab session! We hope you learned what you came to learn.

Lab System Overview

Server Username Password Operating System

VISIONHOLMASTER Administrator Vision2013 Windows

Some quick notes on the OpsCenter instance we are using

The OC database in use was pulled from a live environment therefore it has production data in it. There are NO live Masters when you start the lab. The data is static – therefore all masters have been disabled in the Configuration section. Since this lab is about reporting on historical data, a live machine is not needed. For configuration purposes we will be adding a NBU master that resides on the same machine as the OpsCenter Master but it does not have actual data on it beyond a couple of test backups.

Starting up the Virtual Machines

The Virtual Machine should be running when you enter the lab. If not, follow the instructions on the screen to boot the VM. The OpsCenter Machine is a single, standalone VM with a demo database. It does not have an active connection to any Master Server.

The Windows login is Administrator with a password of Vision2013 (case sensitive)

The OpsCenter login is admin with a password of password

The OpsCenter Server – Basic Overview

Running OpsCenter in a VM is not recommended due to the database in use. Performance on this machine may be sluggish compared to what you would see on a dedicated machine.

Note: The lab machine has been forced to start up on March 7, 2013 at to give the best reporting options and to show “live” data on a VM that was built a few weeks ago for use at the Vision conference.

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Lab Agenda

Topic 1

OpsCenter Introduction PowerPoint 5 minutes

Activity 1 – OpsCenter Configuration Overview

Using OpsCenter:

Logging in

Overview of OpsCenter options

Adding a Master using new Wizard

Adding a Master manually

Data Collection Overview

Global Configuration Options

(Lab Exercises 1 - 4)

12 minutes

Activity 2 – OpsCenter Reporting

Report Overview

Popular Reports

Saving and Scheduling Reports

(Lab Exercises 5 - 7)

xx - xx minutes

Activity 3 – OpsCenter Advanced Options

Alerts

Overview of View Based Access Control (VBAC)

Operational Restore

(Lab Exercises 8 – 10)

xx – xx minutes

All of the parts of this HOL can be run without an OpsCenter Analytics key. Please feel free to take this guide with you if you would like to try out OpsCenter in your environment.

Activity 1 – OpsCenter Overview

Lab Exercise 1

Overview – Checking out some of the Monitor Options 5 minutes

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To begin the Lab, you should be at the Windows desktop. Double-click on the “OpsCenter Login” icon on the screen.

1. The login name is “admin” and the password is “Vision2013”. Click on “Log On” (leave the Domain as OpsCenterUsers(vx))

2. There are a number of Masters shown on the left hand side. None of these are “live” Masters. They were used to gather a production demo database. So we can still report on them, but they are no longer gathering live data.

Once logged in, you are looking at the Monitor screen. This screen has been tailored to give a NetBackup admin a quick overview of what has happened in the backup environment over the last 24 hours. You can quickly see other time frames by clicking on the options at the top Right – Last 48 Hours and Last 72 Hours. At this time, this main landing page is not customizable.

Below the Monitor there are a number of tabs. Overview, Jobs, Services, Policies, Media, Devices, Hosts, Alerts, Alerts, Audit Trails, Cloud and Appliance Hardware as seen in the picture below. Much of what an Admin would do on a daily basis revolves around this portion of the GUI. We will get to reporting in the next step, but let’s get to know a few useful parts of this GUI in a quick three minutes.

Click on Jobs. o Since this is a test machine with a demo database the information is not 100% up to

date but using the Filter drop down an Admin can quickly see – for example - what jobs have failed in the last backup session. There are quite a few other options to see job status as well.

Next, lets jump to Policies o Typically you would need to filter by Master in a large environment however in the test

environment we only have a few pages of Policies. This is where an Admin could start a Manual Backup of a Policy. Note that at this time, OpsCenter cannot be used to modify a Policy. You still need the NBU GUI to do this.

Now click on Media o This is pulling the media information from all of the Masters and their media servers in

our test database. In this demo DB there are over 7700 pieces of media to report on (look at the number of Rows that shows up under the information). Note on the far right the Used Capacity.

Finally click on Devices o Using filtering would allow the Admin to see what drives were up/down and give them

the ability to reset them. Click on Filter > Down Drives to check it out. There is also information about Disk Pools available on this screen. Click on the tab next to Drives to check it out.

That’s it for now – at the end of the lab you are welcome to explore these options further. Some – like Cloud and Appliance Hardware won’t offer much information since we do not have live connections.

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All in all for many of the mundane day to day tasks across multiple Masters, a NetBackup Admin can use OpsCenter instead of logging into each Master. While the ability to create/edit Policies is not yet part of the functionality of OpsCenter, it will be in the future - so an Admin who is familiar with OpsCenter now - will also benefit in the future.

Lab Exercise 2

Using the new Wizard to Add a Master 3 minutes

Starting in OpsCenter 7.6, a new “Home” Wizard GUI has been added which helps the users with initial startup tasks. Once the environment is up and running you may not use this GUI again, but for new users, it makes adding Masters, Adding Views (also called Groups post 7.6), adding users and some other configuration tasks much easier. For the purposes of this lab we will just be adding a Master using this Wizard. We will also see how to add a Master manually. You are welcome to come back to this Exercise after the lab to play with the other options if there is time. One thing to note is that if you install a new NetBackup Master and tell it the name of the OpsCenter Master, it will automatically be added to OpsCenter. Let’s get started on adding a new Master:

1. Click on Home in the top left of the OpsCenter GUI 2. Click on the Add NetBackup Master Servers button 3. Type in the name of the OpsCenter Master “visionholmaster”

a. Note: There is a basic NBU instance running on this machine but it is not recommended to use the NBU Master as the OpsCenter Master except in very small environments

4. Note that the Display Name is added for you but let’s change this to make it more user friendly for your environment.

a. In a large environment with many Masters, the actual server name may not be what you call the machine.

5. Under Display Name type “Vision NetBackup Instance” 6. Click Next

This will now go try to communicate with the Master. Note that the OpsCenter machine name has been added to the Master under Host Properties so that the OpsCenter Master can communicate with the NetBackup Master. This is similar to adding a Media Server to a NetBackup Master to allow for communication and control.

7. The screen you are now seeing is used if you want to pull capacity information from NetBackup Masters. This is beyond the scope of this Lab and this system is not configured to pull this information. Leave everything unchecked and click on Next

8. Click Save

9. The NetBackup Master has been added successfully and we can now pull information from it. Click Close

That is all there is to adding a Master. If you want to see how to add one manually, perform the following steps.

1. Click Settings

2. Click Configuration

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3. Below the “NetBackup” Tab, click Add

The steps from this point are the same as using the Wizard. It is just a bit harder to find this area vs. using the Home screen and the new Wizard.

Go ahead and cancel out of this screen.

That is all there is to adding a Master to OpsCenter – again, the OpsCenter Master has to be added to the NetBackup master so they can communicate but that is beyond the scope of this lab.

While we are at the Settings screen, let’s look at a few options that we can configure.

Lab Exercise 3

Data Collection Overview 2 minutes

OpsCenter collects data at pre-determined intervals from NetBackup. While it is not “real time” per se, it is pretty close to real-time for most operations. Also, there is no easy way to “force” a data collection. The refresh button doesn’t do it. This is done on purpose to prevent admins from creating bottlenecks by constantly clicking refresh.

Now that we have added a new Master, let’s go see how it is doing.

1. From the Settings >Configuration screen, and under the NetBackup tab, find the Master we just added named “visionholmaster”

a. It may be at the bottom of the screen

2. Put a check in the box next to the name then click on the master name hyperlink next to the checkbox to load the data

3. At the bottom of the page, you will see two tabs – General and Data Collection Status – click on Data Collection Status

4. You will see under Collection Status if the collection is complete or not, as well as the last time it ran.

This is a good way to know how “fresh” the data is. One thing to note is that if “nothing” happens, these times may not update. If you are not running BMR for example, the BMR field may have a date older than the Job information. As long as the data collection is completed, then data is being pulled.

Let’s move on to some configuration options.

Lab Exercise 4

General Configuration Options 2 minutes

There are a few configuration options you may want to set – like adding a SNMP server, and an email for the default admin account along with some contact information. So from this screen perform the following actions

1. Click on SMTP Server a. Note the options that you can use b. We don’t have SMTP running in this lab so you cant really add one, but this is the area

where you would in a production environment 2. Now, click on Data Purge

a. Note the options you can set

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b. In general you do not need to change these from the default but if you do want to change one, be sure and check the manual to understand what you are changing

c. Data Purge should always be checked. Environments rarely have the need to report on jobs past 800 days (for example) so unchecking this could cause the database to grow very large which could create performance issues

3. Now, click on License a. If you are an OpsCenter user and want to upgrade to the paid version – OpsCenter

Analytics – this is where you would ADD the license key 4. Finally, click on Settings again at the top. The default is the User Preferences tab

a. Under General – you can change a number of things including your Locale (if you have the language packs installed)

5. Now, click on My Profile a. This is where you can change the password of the Administrator

We have gone through this configuration information quickly, but you can at least see where you would go to make changes. Please be sure you understand the changes you are making before you make them when you use OC in a production environment. This completes Activity 1.

Activity 2 – OpsCenter Reporting

OpsCenter reporting is what the application is all about. There are a number of ways to provide reporting information. You can use the “Point and Click” reports, you can customize a Point and Click report for your own use or you can create reports from scratch if you are an Analytics customer. This section of the lab will demonstrate using Point and Click reports and editing the Point and Click reports to customize them. While we don’t have time to get too deep, it will give you a basic overview of the Point and Click options and how to save and/or schedule the report for running at a later date.

Lab Exercise 5

Point and Click Report Overview Use Case 5 minutes

For the purposes of this report, we are going to use a Use Case.

Use Case: The Director of Operations has come to you and wants to know how much data was backed up on all of the Clients that have run FULL jobs. There are a number of reports that will show us the information for this use case, but let’s use the Tabular Backup Report since it has a number of editing options

Report 1 - Number of Jobs ran last week on all Masters

1. Click on Reports tab at the top of the screen 2. Expand Backup Reports folder by clicking on the + 3. Expand Job Browser Reports folder by clicking on the + 4. Single click on the Tabular Backup Report hyperlink

a. Once you single click on the hyperlink it will pull the data and build your report using the default settings. This will take a few seconds

The information is nice, but we need to customize it to reduce the amount of screen real-estate this will take up when we export it and email it

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5. Click on the Edit Report button towards the top 6. Change Relative TimeFrame to Previous 1 Weeks

a. Note the other filtering options. We will get into those a bit more in the next report 7. Click Next - Here is the meat of this report. We can include whatever columns we want to

see similar to if we were doing a custom report. a. Put a check box next to the following Column names and Remove them since we

decided we are seeing too much information in the report: i. Job Primary ID ii. Job Secondary ID iii. Schedule/Level Type iv. Job Attempt Count v. Schedule Name vi. Job Status (this is not the same as the Status Code) vii. Product viii. Policy Keyword ix. Storage Unit Name

8. Click Run Report to see what it looks like now after removal of the data we don’t care about This is better, but there are a lot of jobs and we only want to see Full backups right? Let’s clean this up a bit more.

9. Click Edit Report to edit it again 10. Under the Filters, select Schedule 11. Change the Column dropdown to Schedule/Level Type and then under Value change it to

Full Run the report and see that it has reduced the number of Jobs we see by a large number. This is the report we want – so now let’s save the report so we can email it later on in this lab

12. Click Edit Report 13. Click Next three times to get to the Save Report screen 14. Under Report Name type Weekly Jobs Total 15. Click Public Reports to highlight the field (don’t click on the +,just highlight the name) 16. Click Save 17. Click Finish

One option a lot of customers use is to export these types of reports to Excel so they can be sorted and have other processes run against them. At the top of the screen near Edit Report you can see options for exporting any of the reports – and the various formats you can export them in. When we use a Schedule in the next Activity you will see how we can do this automatically. Now let’s look at another popular report the Advanced Success Rate report

Lab Exercise 6

Point and Click Report Overview Use Case 5 minutes

This time we will use a slightly different Use Case.

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Use Case: The Director wants to know how successful the backup environment is, and how much data is being backed for FULL backups up in one report. Backups that have failed – but then run successfully within the window should be excluded - and he wants you to go back for a full month.

1. Click on Reports Tab 2. Expand Backup folder by clicking on the + (if needed) 3. Expand Status and Success Rate Reports folder by clicking on the + 4. Expand the Success Rate Reports folder by clicking on the + 5. Single click on Advanced Success Rate hyperlink

This shows us the daily success rate for the past two weeks but it doesn’t look very good. But we need to refine this to change what we are seeing based on our Use Case above:

6. Click on Edit Report 7. Change Relative TimeFrame to Previous 1 Months 8. Click on Success Rate under Filters

a. The default setting in 7.6 is Last Job Success Rate. This means that any job that failed, but ran successfully later, but still in the window – the report only shows the successful job

b. In 7.5 this is not the default setting. If you are using 7.5 in your environment you would need to change this

9. Change the Consider Partial Successful Job as Successful to Yes a. This means that a Status Code 1 (Open file) will not count against your success rate

10. Change Schedule/Level Type to Full a. This way we will only see the Full backups and not the incrementals

11. Click Next - Leave the Modify Display Options page at default 12. Click Next

Here is our new report. Since we included Status Code 1 and removed Incrementals, our Success Rate has gotten much better. Most customers who have SLA’s only care about Full backups therefore this is a good way to prove how well the environment is doing. Let’s Save this report for emailing in the next step

13. Click Next and type in Monthly Success Rate in the Report Name field 14. Click Public Reports to highlight it (do not click on the +) 15. Click Save 16. Click Finish

Now, if you look below the Report tab, you will see My Reports. Click on it, then click on the + sign next to Public Reports and you will see the two reports we created. Clicking on those reports at any time will run a new report.

Let’s take this a step further – lets email these reports to ourselves every Monday morning at 8:00.

Lab Exercise 7

Creating Reporting Email Schedules 5 minutes

This section will walk you through creating a schedule to email the reports you created earlier and do it based on a time each week - automatically.

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Please note – we do not have a SMTP server set up, so you wont be able to actually email the reports however we can send the output to a directory. In the real world you would need to set up your SMTP server by clicking on Settings > Configuration > SMTP Server as was discussed earlier.

Since the previous exercises created two reports, lets create a schedule to email those reports every Monday morning after the weekend backups are finished.

1. Click on Reports Tab 2. Click Schedules 3. Make sure Report Schedules tab is highlighted (default) 4. Click Add 5. Type Weekly Backup Reports in Report Schedule Name 6. Choose PDF format

a. Note the other options available for sending the email reports as was mentioned earlier in this lab. Sending a .CSV is a great way to import a report into Excel for post-processing.

7. Click Next 8. Make sure Create new Time Schedule is checked 9. Click Next 10. In the Schedule Name box type NetBackup - Weekly Reports 11. Change Schedule Time to 08:00 12. Under Schedule Pattern click Weekly

a. This opens up new options 13. Under the Recur Every box, check Monday (remove any other checked days) 14. Under Range of Recurrence select a start date of today’s date – 03/07/2013. (remember that

the VM is forced to start at a time in the past) 15. Leave No end date checked 16. Click Next 17. Check box next to Export.

a. This will send the PDF to a directory specified in the Configuration settings. 18. Check box next to Email 19. Add an email address of your choice (see note above about no SMTP server) 20. Add a Subject and Message of your choice 21. Click Next 22. Under Public Reports section, select the Reports created in the previous excercises 23. Click Next, then Save then Finish

This has created a schedule so that every Monday at 08:00 these reports will be run, converted to PDF, sent to a directory and emailed to the recipients. Pretty cool right?

Can you think of how this could benefit you in your role? Automatically emailing yourself a success rate from the daily or weekly backups? Should be some time savings in there for the average backup admin who is asked to produce reports.

This completes Activity 2. Now we will look at some of the other things you can do with OpsCenter beyond reporting.

Activity 3 – OpsCenter Advanced Options

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Lab Exercise 8

Creating Alerts 3 minutes

Alerts are similar to Reports except they are used to notify someone when a specific “thing” happens and are limited to a certain set of options. For example, most long time OpsCenter (and previously NOM) customers use Alerts to let them know when the Catalog disk space was getting too full or when too many drives were down. This section will walk you through setting up an Alert and sending it to an email address. There is also an option to send an SNMP trap.

To create an alert when the catalog disk space on the Master goes below a certain threshold, perform the following:

1. Click on the Manage tab 2. Default Tab is Alert Policies 3. In the tab above the Alerts, click Add 4. In the Name: area, type NBU Catalog has less than 5GB remaining. 5. Enter a Description if you like 6. Under Alert Condition scroll down until you see Catalog Space Low and click on the button

next to it. a. Note all the other Alerts that are available.

7. Click Next 8. Under Threshold Value change to 100 and select GB from dropdown 9. Click Next 10. Check the boxes next to EBC Master Server and Vision NetBackup Instance (or whatever

you named the machine in Activity 1 when we added the Master) 11. Click Next 12. Add an Email Recipient 13. Choose Major from dropdown box next to Alert Severity

a. Note the other options 14. Activate the Policy is checked by default 15. Click Save then Finish

Now, the next time the Catalog space has less than 5GB an email alert would be sent. Since this lab does not have an email account, we can’t test the email option if you look at the bottom left of the screen you will see that any alert that gets generated will show up there. Since we set the GB value larger than the entire disk of our test Master, it will generate an alert that will show up here in the next few minutes.

When Alerts show up, you can click on the Icon next to Alert Summary (bottom left corner) to see the Alerts.

Now let’s take a look at View Based Access Controls.

Lab Exercise 9

View Based Access Control 3 minutes

While running OpsCenter as the Administrator is the easiest way to get things done, there are times when you will want to have others helping you – but with limited ability to do things to the environment.

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One Use Case is having a Restore Operator who can only restore a handful of Clients. In order to facilitate this we need to create a VIEW for the clients, create the user, assign them to the View and make sure it all works. This is very easy to do with OpsCenter and View Based Access Controls.

1. Click on Settings > Views

a. There are three Views that have been configured you can check out if you like. 2. Click on Add 3. Type Finance Clients in Name field 4. Leave View Type at Client but note the other options 5. Click OK 6. Select the box next to the View name we just created and click Manage Nodes and Objects

7. Click the Objects not in selected view tab

We need to use our imagination a bit here since we need an active Master connection and we only have one Master – which is also our Client. So we will find that one Client to add to our View.

8. Find the Client named Vision NetBackup Instance that is also our Master and put a check next to it.

a. Since there is no Search you may need to use the Filter options 9. Choose Windows Clients from the Filter: dropdown then you will see only a handful of servers.

Find the client from there. 10. Click Add to Node (this step is often missed)

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11. Click Finish in the bottom right corner

We have just created a “View” and added three Clients to it. Now we can go create the User who can access the restores for this View – and ONLY for this View (so only for the three Clients we have selected)

1. Click Settings > Users 2. Click Add 3. Leave User Creation Type at New User 4. Type James in the User Name

a. Keep this field simple as this is the actual login name 5. Type Vision2013 as the password (use upper case V)

a. There are specific password requirements – however you will need to change the password the first time you log in as well.

6. You will note that the default is Administrator and there is not a View box available yet 7. Choose Restore Operator as the option and note the Available Views box appears 8. Choose the View you created in the last step and click on the > button to move it in the Granted

Views box 9. Click Save and Close

That is all there is to it. We will use this user in the next Activity – Operational Restores

Lab Exercise 10

Operational Restores using OpsCenter (ORO) 3 minutes

Operational Restores (ORO) were introduced in OpsCenter 7.5. It can replace the NetBackup BAR GUI for file and folder restores. It offers the ability to search the catalog for files and offers a restore cart for batching up the files. This activity will walk you through the ORO process.

The Use Case for this Activity is that we want our new Restore Operator “James” to perform a number of Client file restores based on the View we just created and gave him access to. First we need to switch to James as the OpsCenter user.

1. At the top right of the screen click on the Logout button 2. At the login screen, use username James (case sensitive) and password Vision2013 3. Type Vision2013 in the Old Password box and create a new password of Vision2014 4. Use the new password to log in

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The first thing you will notice is that James only has access to information about the three Clients that were configured in the View – and not all of the Masters you saw as Admin. Now, let’s do a quick restore of some data.

5. Click on Manage > Restore 6. Click on the top hyperlink – Restore Files and Directories 7. Type *.PDF in the File or Directory Name field 8. The View cannot be changed, nor can a Master be selected due to the lockout on James 9. Even though we only have one Client in the View, a Client must still be selected 10. Click Browse and Select Clients 11. Put a check next to the only option and click OK 12. Click Search 13. Choose the top file and click on Add to Restore Cart

At this point, you could restore this or any other file that has been backed up similar to the NBU BAR GUI.

For the purposes of this lag we wont actually restore data unless you want to.

Final Thoughts – OpsCenter is included with NetBackup and is a nice reporting tool. While it may not have the same functionality as some of the other 3rd Party options – it is “free” so why not give it a try. More robust reporting options are available using OpsCenter Analytics.

Thank you for joining us today. Again – feel free to take this lab guide with you to try these options at your location.