DPM 2012

DPM Backup Summary Report

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For some time DPM reporting has been an area within DPM that has needed improvement. Since DPM version 2007 the community has asked for improved reporting or an easy way to create custom reports to fit their needs. A quick search will yield many forum threads discussing the need for better reporting in DPM.

Backup administrators need to get detailed reports on Data Protection Manager (DPM) backups. The reports that are included with DPM are not enough and do not contain the data that is often needed for reporting within organizations. Management of IT departments need to know if backup SLA’s are being met and need backup health trend reports. Backup reports and charts need the functionality to be printed, exported and scheduled. DPM already contains some of this functionality through SQL Reporting Services but as aforementioned the out of the box reports do not contain the needed data or charts.

There has been several blogs in the community on how to build your own custom reports for DPM using SQL Report Builder and the DPM SQL views (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff399120.aspx) that are default in the DPM SQL database. See these the following links on creating custom reports for DPM:

https://www.buchatech.com/2011/01/building-custom-reports-in-dpm/

http://blogs.technet.com/b/dpm/archive/2013/01/22/how-to-create-a-custom-report-in-system-center-2012-data-protection-manager.aspx

Even with the ability to create custom DPM reports the need for better reporting within DPM has not gone away. Creating custom reports is not a solution that is viable for all backup administrators out there in the community.

The solution is not viable for several reasons. The DPM SQL views are limited in the data that they allow someone to pull into a report. Therefore the person building the custom reports would need to write SQL queries to pull the data they need. The second reason is that most backup administrators do not have the SQL skills required to go in and build SQL queries. Backup administrators generally do not have the design skillset to build a report with the right charts, graphs and data using tools like SQL Report Builder or Business Intelligence Design Studio (BIDS).

I have teamed up with a buddy of mine that is a business intelligence expert. His name is Brooks Lindall and he is one of the smartest guys I know. A HUGE thanks goes out to him for joining me in trying to solve this problem. Together we created a solution that is the DPM Backup Summary Report. This report was designed with the community in mind. One goal was to make the report portable to any DPM environment so backup administrators could easily drop it in their environment and start reporting on their DPM data right away. With that in mind this report was built in a generic way so that no modifications to SQL are needed when it is installed. We also set out to incorporate as many of the data points that we could that DPM admins in the community have been asking for. We wanted to fit all of the data in a single view. The last goal was to give this report to the community for free.

This report works with DPM 2010 and DPM 2012/R2. For now the report is only for disk and tape based backups. In the future we are looking to extend this in the future to show online (Azure) as well. The features and data points contained in the report are:

  • Ability to select day, week, month (Time range)
  • Ability to select a single server or many
  • Ability to select a single protection group or many
  • Ability to select disk, tape or both backup type
  • Summary of the backup success and failures with a percentage of the successes (Success Rate/SLA)
  • Health trend of backups (day, week, month)
  • Backup detail including:Individual data sources (What was actually backed up)
    •      The status including the error (if there is an error)
    •      Date and time the backup was created
    •      How much data was transferred during the backup
    •      Total time it took to backup to complete

SAMPLE OF REPORT:

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New SCOM DPM Dashboard Download Link

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A company named AIO Technology published a SCOM DPM dashboard a while ago. They recently removed it as they no longer offer this. I was the one that built this dashboard. I am posting about it here for anyone that may be looking to download it. You can now find this on TechNet Gallery here: http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/SCOM-DPM-Dashboard-8eef9b58

Information about the dashboard:

OVERVIEW

This dashboard shows the overall health of your Data Protection Manager (DPM) backups. It includes all DPM servers in your environment in a central location. Great for daily spot checking of your backup health and getting to the root of any problems faster.

Installing is as simple as importing into your Operations Manager (SCOM) server. You do need DPM management packs and central console deployed to your SCOM before installing this dashboard.

DPM Dashboard Example

FEATURES

  • Centralized health of all DPM servers
  • Protection Group health aggregate
  • Protected Data Source health aggregate
  • Storage Pool health aggregate
  • Tape/Tape Library health aggregate

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Windows Server 2003 Support Coming back to DPM 2012 R2

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There have been some grumblings since the release of DPM 2012 R2 as it dropped support for Windows Server 2003 even though Windows Server 2003 is still supported by Microsoft. You can see a glimpse of the communities feedback on this at this TechNet thread: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/c425421b-b726-4125-82fc-beae8947722c/dpm-2012-r2-agent-update-on-windows-2003-server-x64?forum=dpmsetup Many environments out there (and usually not by the … Read more

DPM Azure Cloud Backup – Setup, Config, Recovery

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This topic has been blogged about a few times already. Some of the posts I have seen just contain information about the service and not the setup, are no longer current, or are missing information on generating a certificate.

I have decided to go ahead and blog about this to detail my experience in the setup. In this post I am going to walk through deploying Azure backup for DPM 2012 SP1.

Here is what will be covered: setup of Azure cloud backup, adding Azure cloud backup to a protection group, and recovering data from Azure cloud backup in DPM.

Setup of Azure cloud backup:

This is what the Azure management portal looks like and the first screen you will see when you go create a backup vault. To create the backup vault click on Recovery Services and add cloud backup.

You will notice that it gives you the steps you need to get started with Azure cloud backup.

AzurePortal

The first thing we need to do is create a certificate for our local DPM server and upload this to Azure.

Use the Makecert tool to create a local cert or use an existing local CA to generate the certificate for your DPM server.

Makecert can be found here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsserver/bb980924.aspx as a part of the Windows SDK.

To install makecert.exe only select the option Tools under .Net Development in the SDK install wizard.



Here is the process to create a certificate for your local DPM server.

Open an elevated command prompt (with Admin privileges) and CD to the location where makecert.exe is stored.

On my server it was here:
C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v7.1\Bin Once are there type the following syntax:

makecert.exe -r -pe -n CN=YOURDPMSERVERNAMEHERE -ss my -sr localmachine -eku 1.3.6.1.5.5.7.3.2 -len 2048 -e 01/01/2016 YOURDPMSERVERNAMEHERE

After you create the certificate properly it will be created and stored in the same location here:
C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v7.1\Bin.



NOTE: The expiration date of your certificate has to be no more than 3 years from today’s date or

Azure will not like the cert and you will receive this error:


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Deploy DPM Remote Administration console via SCCM

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In this post I am going to explain the process of deploying the DPM Remote Administration Console to IT admin computers via System Center Configuration Manager 2012. Following are the steps you will need to take to make this happen.

You will need somewhere to group your IT admin computers so that you can target the DPM Remote Administration console to them. Create an IT Admin Computers device collection in SCCM 12. This is what we will use to group the IT admin computers.

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Now we need to copy the contents from the DPM media onto your distribution point share. This will be the CCX86 and SCDPM folders.

NOTE: In my lab for this post I copied these to C:\App Deployments.

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OTHER INFO: As of right now you need to copy all the contents. I don’t know of the specific files that make up the remote administration console. If I track this down later I will update this blog post. If you need to save space you can copy one or the other folder and use it. CCX86 is for 32Bit computers and SCDPM is for 64Bit computers. If you know you will only deploy to 64Bit computers then get the SCDPM folder only.

The next step is to go and create a package for the DPM Remote Administration console.

In the Config Man console go to \Software Library\Overview\Application Management\Packages and create the new package.

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The create package wizard will come up. Go ahead and complete the highlighted fields in the following screenshot and click next.

NOTE: Remember for this post in my lab I copied the DPM software from the media to C:\App Deployments. This is the directory I am setting as my Source folder for this package. Your source folder path will be different.

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Chose standard program and click next.

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Here is where you need to put in the correct command line syntax to make sure it installs the DPM Remote Administration console vs. trying to install the full DPM product. Here is the syntax you will need to put in the Command line: field. See the following screenshot.

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DPM failed to communicate with the protection agent

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Here is the problem on DPM one of the agents for a protected server stops communicating with DPM.  You see the error “DPM failed to communicate with the protection agent on protectedservername.domainname.com because access is denied. (ID 42 Details: Access is denied (0x80070005))” In my scenario the protected server was in a non-trusted domain. I … Read more