Introduction
FSA in Enterprise Vault is in many ways far advanced of the more normally thought about Exchange Mailbox Archiving. One of the ways in which it excels is the reporting of what happens during archiving runs, be it a run now, a scheduled run or whatever you get a lot of information presented to you in report-log files.
This article explains what files you get, how to interpret them, and provides the outline of a Powershell script which can be used to email the report-log files to you, an Enterprise Vault Administrator, on a regular basis.
The Folder Structure
The folder structure begins underneath the Enterprise Vault program folder, under the subfolder Reports. In there you will see something similar to the following :
Underneath Reports\FSA, you will see a folder for each FSA Task. In my example my task is called “File System Archiving Task”. If you have tasks with other names they’ll have separate sub folders.
Under the folder named after the task you will have :
- ArchiveRunNow
- ArchiveScheduled
In each of those folders you will have Completed and InProgress. The InProgress folder will contain a text file of any running instances of this task. Once it’s finished the run, it will move it to the appropriate “Completed” folder. This operation is also logged in the DTRACE of EvFSAArchivingTask.
By default you will have up to 5 folders in the “Completed” folder. This is configurable for each task, on the “Reports” tab.
So as you can see above I’ve done 5 “run now’s” on the task, and none of them are in progress, they all completed.
Transient Files
You will be interested to know that when you do a run-now for example, on an FSA Archiving Task that the following happens :
- If the folder structure doesn’t exist it will be created
- The “InProgress” folder will be used initially.
- It will contain a text file, which will grow as the task runs through it’s operations.
- Once the task completes, or reaches the end of it’s scheduled window the “InProgress” text file will be moved to a subfolder of “Completed”.
- As this move takes place, pruning of the number of report log-files to keep will take place underneath the “Completed” subfolder.
The Files Themselves
Once the run of the task has finished, and the report-log file closed, the information in them looks like this :
Archive mode run started at 28/06/2011 07:26:57 for task File System Archiving Task
Task run: 1
Time File Size (bytes) Policy name Rule name Rule type Archive status Shortcut type Shortcut status
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
28/06/2011 07:27:30 \\exch1\ashare\asd.docx 12524 Default FSA Volume Policy All ARCHIVE Archived CREATESHORTCUTSIMMEDIATELY ShortcutCreated
Summary by volume
\\exch1\fred1
Estimated space saved after shortcut creation and file deletion (MB): 0.00
No items were matched by any rule. Some files may have been ignored because of policy permission settings.
Archive Point Summary
---------------------
ArchivePointPath VaultStoreName RemoveSafetyCopies
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
\\exch1\fred1 fsa1 Immediately
Retention Folders Summary
--------------------------
No folders created.
\\exch1\ashare
Estimated space saved after shortcut creation and file deletion (MB): 0.01
Policy name Rule name Rule type Items matched Size of items matched (MB)
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Default FSA Volume Policy All ARCHIVE 1 0.01
Archive Point Summary
---------------------
ArchivePointPath VaultStoreName RemoveSafetyCopies
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
\\exch1\ashare fsa1 Immediately
Retention Folders Summary
--------------------------
No folders created.
Total volumes processed: 2
Total folders processed: 2
Total number of files matching an archive rule: 1
Total number of files matching an archive and copy rule: 0
Total number of files matching a do not archive rule: 0
Total number of files matching a delete rule: 0
Total files that matched a rule and were processed successfully: 1 (0.01 MB)
Total files archived: 1 (0.01 MB)
Total files excluded by a do not archive rule: 0 (0.00 MB)
Shortcut Creation
Total number of files matching a 'Create Shortcuts Immediately' rule: 1
Total number of files matching a 'Create Shortcuts Later' rule: 0
Total number of files matching a 'None. Archive and Delete File' rule: 0
Total errors reported: 0
Processing of all volumes is complete.
Start time: 28/06/2011 07:26:57
End time: 28/06/2011 07:27:30
Elapsed Time: 00:00:32
There is a lot of useful information in the log file, I’ll touch on a few really important points :
- Each file touched gets a line of summary information in the log file, which tells you exactly what happened :
28/06/2011 07:27:30 \\exch1\ashare\asd.docx 12524 Default FSA Volume Policy All ARCHIVE Archived CREATESHORTCUTSIMMEDIATELY ShortcutCreated
- A summary of space-saving is also incorporated in to the report :
Estimated space saved after shortcut creation and file deletion (MB): 0.02
- The run time of the task is shown in summary at the bottom. You see the start time, the end time, and the duration of the run.
Useful Script
Quite some time ago a poster on the Connect Forums wanted a way to mail to a group of administrators the latest FSA report file. The following Powershell script will do that :
#* Send mail
Write-host "`nSending mail"
$from=new-object system.net.mail.mailaddress "monitoring@yourdomain.local";
$to = new-object system.net.mail.mailaddress "recipients@yourdomain.local";
#* Find the attachment to send
$startpath = "C:\Program Files\Enterprise Vault\Reports\FSA\File System Archiving Task\ArchiveRunNow\Completed"
$folder = get-childitem($startpath) | sort-object Name -Descending | select-object -first 1
$fullfolder = $startpath + "\" + $folder.name
Write-host "`nLooking in folder name : " $fullfolder
$filename = get-childitem($fullfolder)
$att=$fullfolder + "\" + $filename.name
Write-host "Attachment we will add is : " $att
$mail=New-object system.net.mail.mailmessage $from, $to
$mail.subject = "test message";
$mail.body = "some text";
$mail.attachments.add($att);
$smtp = new-object system.net.mail.smtpclient("yoursmtpserver.somedomain.local");
"`nSending message to {0} by using SMTP host {1} port {2}." -f $to, $smtp.host, $smtp.port
$smtp.send($mail);
To run that you need to change :-
- The sender, which is on the line starting $from
- The recipient(s), which is on the line starting $to
- The folder path, in the example here I mailed out the run-now results, you would want the ArchiveScheduled folder rather than the ArchiveRunNow folder. The folder path starts on the line $startpath
- The name of the SMTP/Exchange server to use to send the mail. This is near the bottom of the script, on the line which starts $smtp.
- In addition you can customise the body of the message, and the subject. They’re on the lines $mail.body, and $mail.subject respectively.
Conclusion
FSA produces a report-log file for almost everything type of thing that the archiving task performs. This makes figuring out what happened during an archiving run much easier than, for example, Exchange Mailbox Archiving. This article covers what files are produced, and what they contain, as well as providing a script to email the results to you.
