PureDisk Agent Progress Monitor..What is it?

[Dave_Graham]

What is the purpose of the PureDisk Agent Progress Monitor ?

I see the option to start or stop this on the client.

Is this a way I can get realtime statistics while a backup is running?

I want to be able to see transfer rate etc...while the backup is running

so I know if it's running correctly

I have searched for "Progress Monitor" in all docs and forums with no hits.

Thanks for any info,

Dave Graham

[Douglas_Snyder]

Hello Dave,

The progress monitor is a client side application.  It can be invoked from the system tray (Windows) and you can view the progress of the current workflow or backup.  I do not believe it gives you any performance statistics.

[Dave_Graham]

Hi Doug,

Thanks for the response!

I see the process pdmon.exe running on the clients, but there is nothing

in the system tray related to PureDisk.

I have stopped and started the montior but nothing shows up in the system tray.

I am using RemoteDesktop and/or  mstsc /v:xxxxxxx /console to login

The clients are Win2003 systems. Am I missing something?

Or is something not running correctly?

Thanks for any info!

Regards,

Dave

[Douglas_Snyder]

Hello Dave,

You can control the appearance of the system tray icon in the backup job policies.  Good luck!

[Dave_Graham]

Hi,

I'm just not seeing anything in the backup policies that pertains to enabling

a pdmon icon to appear in the system tray on the client.

I am using the web page for the Storage Pool Authority and have looked

thru everything I could find related to the clients, but saw nothing that

would enable an icon to show up....

Could you give me the specific location and name of what I need to check

off to make the icon appear on the client?

Thanks,

Dave

[Tom_Burrell]

 Dave,

 pdmon has some very annoying characteristics that make it... less than totally useful, shall we say.

Chief among these is: you must be logged in and running pdmon on the client BEFORE the job starts.  If you log in and launch pdmon after the job is in process, you won't see a thing.

If you have pdmon running first, you will then see an icon in the tray once a job starts.  If you click on that, you get.... a message telling you that no information is available because monitoring is not yet set up.  It then asks if you want to set it up.  If you say yes, then you will get job info NEXT TIME a job runs (assuming you are logged in and running pdmon first).

Nice huh?

Once you actually have it running you are blessed with information about which step the job is on, and that's it.  Much better information is available  on the console- but users could conceivably use this to see if jobs are running on their servers.  Kind of.  Maybe- if the circumstances are right.

In a nutshell, it's pretty much useless.

[Dave_Graham]

Tom,

Thanks for this info!

I managed to catch the icon while being logged into one of the clients. I went thru the motions

of enabling, then killed the backup, then started the backup, then ran the monitor.

Not alot of info as you say, but I was curious as to the % completed bar. I wondered if it

was measuring the % complete of the defined backup window, or the % completed of the

total amount of data that needs to be backed up.

At any rate I'm just trying to find a way to monitor progress of a policy that is still

backing up the client for the first time. Until it has completed I see no way of getting

progress info. Of course customers need to know how far along the backups is and when it will

finish but I have no way of getting that info from PureDisk itself, at least that I can find.

Regards,

Dave

[Tom_Burrell]

Dave,

You can KIND OF get this, but it's unreliable and iffy. 

The progress bar only shows how many steps you've completed, and the % is  based on that (ie: 3 out of 5 steps is 60% done).

If you open up job details, you can highlight the  step you're on- the most useful is if you're on "Store the Contents on the Content Routers"- this is the step that actually moves data. If you select that one, then select "Show All" from the dropdown on the upper right- if you are the right point in the job, it will tell you how much data has been moved.  It's hit-or-miss, and not overly accurate, but it can give you some idea where you stand.. roughly...if you don't take it too seriously.

[Kevin_Good]

In general, this sounds like the NetBackup Client Job Tracker...

 Some information, which may or may not be useful to the person looking at it, which may or may not work, and may or may not cause other problems when it's running.

[Dave_Graham]

Does not sound to promising.......

One way I have found is to export the PureDisk client

to my NetBackup environment. Then look at the total

data number from the backup in the Activity Monitor.

Of course if you have lots of clients that are very large

it will take many hours to export them, and you probably

do not want to export everyday. But I am down to 1 client

left doing it's initial sync in PD so every few days I just

do an export.

Dave G