How monitoring BackupExec Agent?

[vdeschamps]

Hi,

Is there any way to monitor BackupExec's own agents?

Thanks.

[Ken_Putnam]

What do you mean by monitor?

What data are you looking to view or collect?

[vdeschamps]

Ken,

I have five servers that lose communication with the agent - usually in full backup.
So I am researching a solution to solve this. My first attemp would be to monitor these agents and then check when they are falling or the reason for this might be happening.
I am also thinking of running a job during working hours (pre-backup) that has the intention to verify that all agents are communicating, but do not know if this is possible with Backup Exec (native).

Could you help me?

Thanks.

[pkh]

No. There is no way to "monitor" a BE remote agent like the way you describe it.  You got to check why you are loosing communication with the remote agents.  One of the reason could be congesting on your network especially if you are using a WAN link.  The other possibility is that the BE remote agent service on the remote server crashes.  In this case, you got to look at the minidump produced by the crash and see what caused the crash.

[Sush---]

Is the communication loss due to the Backup exec Remote Agent service crashing on the remote server. Usually when the Remote agent service terminates during the backups then the backup job fails with the error Communication has been lost.

For this what you can do it put the Remote agent service on the remote server in debug mode. So during the job it will keep on collecting the logs and ones the service terminates then the debugging will be stopped and error will be recorded in the logs.

To start debugging go to services.msc on the remote server and stop the Backup Exec Remote Agent service. Go to properties of the service and in the start parameter type " -debug " and then click on START and OK.

Now the log will be generated at the location C:\Program Files\Symantec\Backup Exec\RAWS\Logs folder on the remote server. You can test the backups and you will see the log file (servername-beremote.log) will collect the logs.

Thanks,

-Sush...

[vdeschamps]

I created a job that runs at noon and goes through all the servers that are backed up overnight. Once you've done a post-command is executed and transfer them by e-mail me the information the agents stopped by a powershell script that searches a string (Remote agent not detected on Server) within the XML.

Thanks.