Simplified, Automated Backup Reports
Bocada is currently shipping Bocada® Enterprise 5. This release is based on the same robust technology of previous versions and contains exciting new features that include policy reporting, occupancy reporting, and drive and library reporting - all wrapped into an updated GUI and designed to facilitate your progress when implementing the Data Protection Service Management (DPSM ) Model, an ITSM like actionable methodology targeted at enhancing the delivery of data protection services. Below are a few samples of the many report types to help implement the DPSM model available in Bocada Enterprise.
- Assessing the Backup Environment
- Policy and Configuration Management
- SLA Management
- Risk & Problem Management
Assessing the Backup Environment
The first step in the DPSM Model is performing a health check of the environment to identify the current state of ongoing protection activities. The following reports help reveal the effectiveness of an organization’s enterprise data protection environment, pinpoint and eliminate trouble spots, reveal resource usage and growth rates and identify opportunities for improvement.
TopBackup Success/Failure Reports
Many administrators struggle obtaining a centralized view of backup activity across multiple backup applications, customers and/or data centers. The Success and Failure reports allow customers to quickly assess backup activity outcome throughout the enterprise or customer base, with the ability to drill in on areas of concern. These reports highlight failed backups and replicas and systemic problems in easily scanned matrices of backup servers, clients, and targets, allowing users to identify problems and take corrective actions across the entire backup environment. In addition, it is critical to group this information as the business sees it - by department, customer, region, priority and many more. Bocada Enterprise’s Zone functionality allows users to automatically group servers and leverage these groups (zones) throughout the application for both report presentation and distribution
The success/failure report clearly reveals patterns of backup failures, and critical applications and servers with vulnerable data. This report can speed and prioritize troubleshooting efforts by providing a summary of the failure cause, and if needed, a drill down to see the original error message generated by the backup application.
TopBackup Occupancy Reports
Gathering insight into storage growth rates and usage can be a time consuming and challenging endeavor for any storage team. Bocada Enterprise 5 provides unique insight into the total data stored on media and uncovers costly backup policies. This occupancy reporting provides a previously very difficult-to-obtain view of the number media images that are valid targets for restores--instead of simply providing information on the total storage at a point in time. By trending this information over time, storage teams can assess the impact of retentions settings and backup frequency on storage growth and demonstrate the results of these decisions back to the business. Occupancy information can also allow users to track how changes made to the environment affect the data growth rates.
Occupancy Trending allows users to trend growth rates in total storage usage over time and break this information out by zone such customer, application and region. Teams can identify policies and procedures that are resulting in significant growth in data amounts driving dialogue with end users about true data protection requirements.
TopDrive Utilization Reports
Libraries remain a costly asset in many storage environments, and ensuring these assets are being utilized properly can save significantly on capital expenditures. Bocada Enterprise 5 gives customers visibility into the utilization and optimization of their drives and libraries. Reports and uses include:
- Peak drive utilization trends:
- High level trend report reveals the overall level of utilization and pinpoints ways to balance loads more evenly across libraries.
- Detailed drive utilization:
- Shows usage patterns for each drive in a library to identify underutilized resources.
- Business views:
- o Views of total drives and drives in use, organized by data center, application, department or across the entire environment.
Administrators can assess the current capacity across one or more libraries to identify over and underutilized assets, measure load balancing in an effort to reduce cost and maximize return on hardware investments.
TopPolicy and Configuration Management
A critical area in improving backup performance focuses on analyzing backup configurations.
By reviewing data protection and backup policies and processes, opportunities can be identified
to better ensure success, recoverability, efficient use of backup resources and IT business alignment.
Policy Configuration Reports
Gathering information on policy configurations across multiple backup servers and policies is a time consuming effort taking backup administrators away from more important tasks. The Policy Configuration Reports provides a centralized view into important policy configuration components, allowing users to:
- Determine if the current policies support recoverability goals.
- Determine if the current policies are active.
- Ensure consistent policies across application type.
- Provide visibility to end users on how the assets are being protected.
With a centralized view of key policy attributes, poorly configured polices will quickly become apparent. In this example, the customer has a policy which is keeping only one backup version of critical email data - indicating that successful backup outcome doesn’t necessarily guarantee recoverability.
TopClient Configuration Reports
Improperly configured client settings can cause failures or slow running backups regardless of policy configurations. Client Configuration Reports provides a centralized view into important client configuration metrics.
- Identify out-of-date client and operating system versions that should be top priority for upgrades.
- Identify clients associated with multiple policies resulting in wasted resources.
- Identify under or over-protected assets.
Keep track of out of date versions and other client settings to drive more consistent configurations in the environment. In this example, notice that two of the clients are running older client versions of the backup software.
TopSLA Management
An important component of the DPSM model is incorporating a service delivery mentality to data protection. With SLA Management in Bocada Enterprise, organizations can confidently create and publish a data protection service catalog to their end users and measure results against those criteria. Managing SLAs enables organizations to effectively measure adherence and success rates and publish results to customers as well as justify implementation of chargeback processes for the services provided by the backup team.
TopBackup SLA Reports
The Backup Service Level Agreement Reporting in Bocada Enterprise provides three different approaches to tracking Service Level Agreement (SLA) compliance and documenting causes of SLA noncompliance. Users can (1) view a detailed workflow report to identify problem areas requiring further investigation, (2) summarize and distribute information on compliance and noncompliance to internal and external audiences, and (3) view compliance progress over time to identify longer trends in overall backup performance - have changes made to the backup environment resulted in improved performance?
The Bocada Enterprise SLA Trends Report measures performance against agreed to service level agreements, allowing storage teams to track progress over time. More detailed reports are also available to diagnose missed or low SLAs that indicate at-risk clients.
This sample SLA compliance details report measures compliance by asset priority, allowing teams to measure success/performance against agreed upon SLAs. Leveraging Bocada Enterprise’s zone functionality enables users to group assets as the business sees them, including priority, region, billing department, etc.
TopChargeback Reports
Chargeback Reports in Bocada Enterprise allows users to set prices based on frequency of backups or amount of data associated with backup activities. These reports, even when created for theoretical purposes, expose the cost of data protection service to customers. They can also help drive home the point that backup/storage costs need to be considered during design planning and not only when the servers are already in production. Storage teams can promote the idea of negotiation of backup services based on the cost to the company helping emphasize to data owners to thoughtfully consider what the true protection requirements are for the data.
A sample Chargeback Report in Bocada Enterprise - automate the billing process for backups, removing the need to manually generate backup cost spreadsheets at the end of each billing period.
TopRisk & Problem Management
Storage teams are constantly required to protect increasing amounts of data with limited resources. The ability to identify and prioritize problem areas in the environment is critical to meeting SLAs and mitigating risk of unrecoverable data. By utilizing Bocada Enterprise Risk and Problem Management reporting, administrators can quickly expose risk areas, eliminate problem areas, track problem resolution, identify unprotected assets and confidently deliver against published SLAs.
TopDrill Down Capabilities
For users who want to quickly obtain more information on specific activities of concern without logging on to each backup server, the drill down capabilities of the Bocada Enterprise Success & Failure Report allow quick visibility into the job activity and any associated informational and error messages. Administrators can prioritize errors based on the type of error and data classification, focusing efforts on the severe failures that result in unrecoverable data of mission critical assets.
Drill down into failed activity to investigate associated informational/error messages and codes to assess what caused the failure and determine necessary remediation.
TopOrphans Report
Many storage teams have received requests for recovery from customers only to discover that the requested asset was not currently under protection. The Bocada Enterprise Orphans Report helps storage teams identify assets that are not currently being protected and therefore at risk of not being recoverable. Users can systematically scan subnets to gather a list of all servers in the environment, or if preferred, import a list of assets requiring protection from an asset management database. By comparing this list with what is actually being protected, customers can proactively pinpoint assets that do not have active backups occurring and therefore cannot be restored if needed.
This sample Orphans Report displays all the servers that were found to exist in the environment but are not currently being protected - discover unprotected assets before the end user requests a restore!
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