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Viewing jobs for multiple servers at once in Backup Exec 2012

GregOfBE
Level 4
Employee

In Backup Exec 2012's new server-centric Backup and Restore view, some of you may be wondering if you can see backup jobs across your environment at once since there is no "Job Monitor" anymore. The answer is that you can.

In the "Backup and Restore" view, you see a list of the servers you are backing up. This shows you the name of the system, active alerts that are related to jobs on that system, an overall backup status, the last and next backup dates and a graphic we call the "last 7 days" indicator. The last 7 days indicator gives you a visual snapshot of how the last 7 days of backups have gone - red/yellow/green. You can click on that indicator and see the list of jobs that ran and further click on those to see their job log. This view gives you a lot of information about the servers you are backing up and their status. You can also right-click on the column header to select other columns such as the agent version information and other fields.

So what about jobs? If you select any of your servers, you'll see the yellow button shaped like a right arrow at the top right of the server list. This is called the "Details button". If you click it, you'll drill into the server and see the details view of the selected server. This is where you can see lists of jobs, alerts, job history and other data for that server. The "Jobs" tab shows the scheduled and active jobs which corresponds to the "Current jobs" list of the old Job Monitor in prior releases. The "Job History" tab shows the history. To get back, in the upper left, clicking the "Back" button that takes you back up to the server list again. 

That's all good...but this is only showing jobs for one server. If you go back to the server list, you must realize that you can select multiple servers too. You could select all using Ctrl+A or you could Ctrl+Click any servers you wanted. Notice now that the "Details button" shows something like "3 Servers" if you had selected 3 [See the screen shot below]. Click that button and you'll see the details view again, but this time it will show a combined list of jobs, job history and alerts for all 3 servers. You could select all servers if you wanted and click that button and then you'll see all jobs, job history and alerts for all of your servers.

 

  

 

In the Jobs tab of the details view, you'll notice that backups are shown in a tree/list form by default. You can expand them and see your full backup, incremental backup, duplicate and other operations. But suppose you want to select all full backups to run them or put them on hold. It may be easier to switch to the "List view". Notice that there are 2 buttons in the toolbar called "Tree" and "List". Click "List" and now the jobs will be displayed in a "flattened" list. You can then sort on any of the columns including the "Job Type" and select all full backups more conveniently. Using the list view combined with selecting multiple servers approximates some of the functionality of the Job Monitor of prior releases. You can see all of your backup jobs across your environment. But you also have the flexibility of choosing any arbitrary subset of servers and see all backup jobs across those too. You can also turn on groups and double-click the "All Servers" group to quicky see all backup jobs for all servers without having to multi-select.

 

 

Storage related utility jobs are found in the Storage View and Reports are shown in the Reports view. So, you are not able to see all jobs in the system this way - only those that are related to the Backup and Restore view. This is part of the new design philosophy of putting things more in their own context.

That's all for now, I'll try to give some more tips on the new design in upcoming posts.

To learn more about Backup Exec 2012 and how to use it, see the videos at http://backupexec.com/videos. They are short (5-10 minutes) and do a great job of explaining how to use the product.

If you'd like to post questions and comments, go to our forums at https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/backup-and-recovery/forums/backup-exec.

If you have additional ideas for what you'd like to see in future releases, submit them at https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/backup-and-recovery/ideas.