So far we have covered the steps on how to download the plugin, configure the pre-requisites and finally Install the plugin. All this is fine but we still need to do some configurations on the plugin so that we are all set for monitoring the Back Exec environments, which is afterall our primary requirement isn't it. So without taking too much of your time, lets just jump straight into it.
To monitor Backup Exec servers, several agent procedures have been provided under Agent Procedures > Manage Procedures > Schedule /Create > Shared > Backup Exec Procedure. All the agent procedures MUST be run from this default location only.
Installation for the plug-in agent is required to start monitoring Backup Execs servers prior to BE 2012 versions. Backup Exec 2012 versions can be monitored by just scheduling the agent procedures.
Note:
Support for BE 2012 is agent less hence we do not need to install any agent on these Backup Exec servers. Powershell 2.0 is MUST have on Backup Exec 2012 versions as we leverage Backup Exec BEMCLI to gather data.
Install Powershell 2.0 before proceeding to next steps in case of Backup Exec 2012
This is required to make the plug-in aware that Backup Exec and the plug-in agents (needed for pre BE 2012) are installed on the Managed machine. Until the Audit completes, status will not be correctly reflected in the “Discovered Machines “page.
Scheduling of agent procedures is required to change the status of a Backup Exec server to “Monitored”. It is recommended that you schedule these agent procedures as needed, except “Gather Backup Exec Plug-in support information” agent procedure. This procedure must be run on demand in case of failures to help Symantec support in troubleshooting the issues.
Following two agent procedures MUST be scheduled to run on Backup Exec servers:
This procedure gathers the Backup Exec summary from the managed computers that have the Agent for Backup Exec Plug-in installed. The summary information provides concise overviews on the status of your active alerts, backup jobs, and storage devices.
This procedure gathers the summary information of the Backup Exec inventory from the managed computers that have the Backup Exec Plug-in installed. The summary information is mainly useful for monitoring inventory items, such as, the Backup Exec license.
Following two agent procedures must also be scheduled on Kaseya Server (These are server specific agent procedures and should not be scheduled on clients)
This procedure imports the settings from the Admin Configuration XML file and makes them effective. The Admin Configuration XML file contains important settings such as, data retention period, log retention period, and device space thresholds. Note that this procedure must be set to run only on the computer that has Kaseya Server and Backup Exec plug-in installed on it.
This xml can be found at X:\Kaseya\WebPages\BackupExec\ASPx\ Admin_Configuration.xml
This procedure permanently deletes the monitoring information that is gathered from the Backup Exec media servers when its retention period expires. You can set the retention period in the Admin Configuration XML file.
Once the status of machine is changed to “Monitored”, user can see the Backup Exec data on plug-in pages e.g. Dashboard and other pages.
The first time “Gather Backup Exec Summary” agent procedure runs, it brings the last 5 weeks of data and any subsequent run just bring the delta changes i.e. new job run, alerts. For more detail on this refer the Administrator Guide under Help > Administrator’s Guide.
There are various pre canned reports provided which can be exported to different formats as per your need. The report uses SQL reporting services to render reports
Sample Active Alert Report
Any time plug-in or plug-in agent encounters some error e.g. Power shell 2.0 not installed (This is must on BE 2012 machines) or BE services not running or invalid data in xml, it logs an exception. These exceptions may help you to troubleshoot the issue.
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