Forum Discussion

Connie_Falk_Mil's avatar
10 years ago

Data Insight

I have a question. We are using Data Insight 4.5.1 on our SharePoint 2010 sites. We have a large SharePoint farm and do not scan all of the sites. We have loaded the WebApps to DI and within each WebApp we selectively scan specified site collections. In the DI 4.5 User guide (link below) under the Category "About Data Insight reports", there is a note (see below). We have not done a "full scan of a SharePoint server", only selected site collections. Does this mean that the reports are not accurate? In what way would they be inaccurate?  Thanks, Connie

https://sort.symantec.com/public/documents/SDI/4.5/windows/productguides/html/sdi_user/sdi_ref_reports.htm

 

About Data Insight reports

 

Note:

If a full scan of a filer server, share or a SharePoint server has not been completed at least once, the data in the reports may not be accurate.

  • Connie:

    A full scan collects the meta-data of objects and captures the create time (ctime), owner, size and other data. The access events create files that record the delta changes from the full scans and cause incremental (Daily) scans when access events occur against monitored objects. The access events are recorded against objects and update the accessed time (atime) and last accessed by for the objects. A complete set of data for use in most reports requires the completed meta-data, user's access, size on disk and is dependent on the report creation and scope itself.

    If I have a large webapp but do NOT select to discover automatically all newly added shares then I will not have a representation of the webapp nor any access events with sites or objects within the site(s) collections under the webapp.

    This is configured under the

    Discovery Details
    Exclude following site collections from discovery (e.g. https://webapp/test*)

    without a checkmark there will be NO automatic discovery.

    Auditing of access events, referred to as Monitoring are under -

    SharePoint Event Monitoring

    This will allow capture of the access events occuring within the webapp but not delete the logs on the SharePoint site leaving them to be administered by the SharePoint Administrator and retention settings.

    Scanning is enabled against the webapp under

    Scanning Details
    Scanning schedule (for full scans)
     
     

    Once you add a site collection and configure it to be scanned you will see it under Monitored Site Collections. These site collections are then active for the webapp and will be actively scanned and can be reported on. You typically choose from amongst the discovered site collections for the webapp.

    Note: in a very large webapp it can be time consuming to select individual sites collections and you should decide if you wish to add them all automatically and remove / disable the undesired ones or add the individual ones depending on the math of your situation. Adding automatically can be turned off later by editing the configuration and removing the check mark from beside "".

    SP_Site_0_0.jpg

     

    When creating a report and choosing the device for the webapp you should expect that after fully scanning and completing the scan the metadata would be available for the added site collection but you should not expect to have fully fleshed out data or all site collections available when drilling down to the 'Available Data' sources under the  'Data Selection' section of report creation as they will not have been added or scanned. If you desire to report on site collections they should be added to the monitored shares and a full scan completed.

    Any scan initiated via the console using either the filters, highlight or check box for the desired site collection and clicking the scan button will perform a full scan:

    SP_Sitescan.jpg

    or the manual per site collection method with the action button on the right of the listed site collection

    SP_Sitescanman.jpg

    The report will not be inaccurate perse as it should contain the information you have configured for collection and have completely indexed prior to the report creation. That said however you will not have a representation of your total environment and should not expect to have the site collections which are not configured for any type of collections (Scanning or Monitoring) into the Symantec DataInsight (SDI) product.

    To thoroughly answer your question regarding the

    Note:

    If a full scan of a filer server, share or a SharePoint server has not been completed at least once, the data in the reports may not be accurate.

    If you run a report in the context of the webapp and not the monitored share there will not be accurate information you could compare to the actual SharePoint webapp as it would not be complete. If you run a report in the context of the monitored share it would be accurate  and representative of the actual data at the time of the scope selected assuming the above conditions are met.

    Hopefully that clarifies the note better in your mind and offers you the ability to test reporting against the data you should expect to see from the indices of the application.

    Note: the same criteria is true of the data represented in the Workspace of the console which is rendered from querying the indices stored of the indexer worker nodes.

    Rod