Sometimes you want Backup Exec back...

So some weeks on and DPM on the whole is everything a backup product should be. There are a few annoyances and a few things that need radical improvement, but on the most important factor - backup reliability, DPM wins hands down.

One area though that Backup Exec was MUCH better at is E-Mail Alerting. Firstly, it was more flexible - any SMTP server was OK, and that worked great for us. DPM however only seems to work if it's pointed at an Exchange based environment - which was a bit annoying since that's not really how I wanted it done. I guess that's the side effect of the "optimal for microsoft based workloads" strategy, but nonetheless...

The other bit though is the alerting capability. You can have alerts for 3 categories "Informational" "Warning" and "Critical", and a list of e-mail addresses to send to. You get one list of e-mail addresses and ALL of those addresses can receive the alerts you enable.

You can't set any thresholds, you can't customise the alerts and most annoyingly, it alerts you to both "Problems" and "Resolved". Given it tries to self resolve I was hoping "Critical" would only alert you to issues it has tried to resolve and failed at or cannot resolve because it needs our intervention.

All in all a bit poor and makes me want BEWS back, just for that bit anyhow...

Reporting in Backup Exec ... no more pain and misery...

If, like me you manage a largeish Backup Exec installation with several media servers, hundreds of backups and lots of clients, you'll probably be pretty frustrated with the half assed nature of the Backup Exec logging and reporting capabilities.

For a long time, I've wanted a simple, but powerful way to do things like "show me backups that are consistently failing over 'x' period, or show me the most likely time of day for backup jobs to fail etc.

So, having looked everywhere and found no sane solution, I've just started writing one. Now I have a great little interface where I can review my backups, see what jobs are failing constantly, review the issue, fix it and then mark it as resolved so it can start being checked again.

I'm thinking of adding lots of features and eventually making it something I can sell for a reasonable (read: not outrageous) fee to others who feel the pain...

Any suggestions welcomed...