Hi everyone. I'm going to jump right in to my first post (the main reason for starting this blog in the first place) and show you the progress I've made with automating daily reports using our backup solution of choice, Symantec (used to be Veritas) Netbackup.
Until now our users have demanded daily reports to be emailed out to key individuals. The format of these emails was quite basic in theory...it simply showed a list of all servers (clients) that were backed up, their status from last night (e.g. successful, failed, etc...) but then, crucially, a list of files that had been skipped.
The reason for listing each file that had failed was due to Netbackup's poor poor (don't get me started on how poor) feedback in the Activity Monitor and it's built in reports. You see sometimes jobs could be marked as "Successful with warnings" if the job completed but the odd file had been skipped (if it were in use, for example). But other times, although it still listed which files had been missed if you double-clicked on each job, it showed the overall status as Successful. This meant that to report on the servers in the format that was required by our users we had to manually trawl through the 360 jobs across two Netbackup servers just to copy and paste the lines of the files that had been missed.
Needless to say it didn't take me long to get bored of this so I started looking at a way of reproducing our reports automatically. After some time, I've come up with a solution - it uses VBScript to parse the logs files which I output using a few key Netbackup command-line tools.
I'm at home now but as soon as I'm back in the office I'll post the script(s) for all to see, comment on and use.
