DPM 2012 - no reports on backup jobs for you!

This morning we came across an interesting issue with DPM 2012, something which is really trivial, but really annoying if you don't know what is wrong!

Recently I moved our DPM servers over to DPM 2012 - and was amazed by how smoothly it went (more because I'm used to upgrading Backup Exec and watching the earth cave in), and all seemed to be working well.

However, I'm VERY paranoid when it comes to backups - and so my colleague has responsiblity for making sure backups happen - reviewing reports and so on. We'd been using the reporting in DPM 2010 quite happily, he received and reviewed the reports on a regular basis.

Since 2012 he'd not been getting them... it seems that the reporting gets broken on an upgrade, and the SMTP Server settings were not right anymore - bizarrely each server we had seemed to have different states - one had no SMTP Server details anymore, one had them but complained they weren't right, and the other had half of the settings. All very strange.

In theory this wasn't an issue - back into SMTP Settings, repopulate and reconfigure the reporting part.

Or not...

Despite having all the details in the "SMTP Server" setting, and having those details set correctly (validated by the send test option and the receipt of a test e-mail etc) we couldn't setup any of the reports.

Why?

Error 3010
"DPM cannot setup an e-mail subscription for this report"
(and then advises you to go and setup your SMTP Server!)

It turns out that the issue is in fact that SQL Reporting Services doesn't actually have the details you entered - from what I can see, the system still looks in the DPM 2010 instance of SQL (because it doesn't remove it or the instance of old SQL it made) at upgrade, so it updates that instead. D'oh!

Whilst that's clearly a bug and should be fixed, the good news is that there is a quick fix.

Go into SQL Reporting Services Configuration, log into the DPM2012 instance, choose the "E-Mail Settings" and fill in the Sender Address and SMTP Server. Save that and you're golden.

Removing orphaned/old Agents from DPM Management View

Just a quick tip - we're preparing our upgrades to DPM 2012 and have decided it's about time we cleaned up some bits and pieces in DPM.

One of the "to clear up" items was to remove old no-longer-in-use Protected Computers from the Agents List in Management - for various reasons we'd ended up with some machines who still show up despite being long since removed and thrown away.

There's no way to do this from the main UI, but with a quick bit of DPM powershell you can nuke those old systems...

Run this script:

Remove-ProductionServer.ps1 -DPMServerName DPMSERVERNAMEHERE -PSName SERVERNAMEHERE

NOTE: You'll generally need to do "SERVERNAME.fullyqualified.com" if it is a domain joined server.

Once you've closed/reopened the UI you'll have a much tidier list :-)

Making it work: Tip #1

As this Backup Exec system has given us so much hell, we've learned a few things you won't find in the manual, so as we think of them, we'll make a note of them for you in case you stumble across this page determined to find fixes to your Backup Exec issues.

My first top tip is this - if you find your server regularly ends up in a 100% CPU used status, not long after jobs should have been submitted to the queue via your policy, the chances are you've come across "incapability bug #1" - it seems Backup Exec can't handle having LOTS of jobs submitted at once - despite this being impossible to control if you create a policy for a group of servers which is recommended. So split your jobs into lots of smaller policies starting them a few minutes apart from each other (we did it 15 mins apart but you can go closer from experiements tried here) (no more than 20 jobs/selection lists per policy). Result, "bengine" stops sitting there at 100% CPU and causing the dreaded "server paused" fault.