Scratch tape count over time?

[thesanman]

Can it be done?  A bar graph showing number of scratch tapes in each of my libraries over (say) 6 months, grouped by day or week?  I'm trying to get a feel for tape usage so as the time gets near I can order new tapes before actually running out!

Thanks in advance

[payners]

Yes this can be done. if you are collecting media data once a day you can get that snapshot of how many tapes are in the scratch pool every day. One thing to watch for is if you do not specifically select your "onsite" volume group then you will be reporting on both offsite and onsite scratch tapes. But this may be what you are looking for anyways. You can do this through the custom report wizard.

[thesanman]

My data just looks plain wrong!

I went down this route as you sugested.  Selected Distinct Media Id stacked bar for my Y Axis; then selected Backup Media Allocation Time for my X Axis; grouped by 1 day with a timeframe of 1 month.

I then filtered Backup Media based on the "scratch" volume pool name.

When I run the report the counts are just plain wrong! 

I'm not sure which time frame to use; according to the definition I have; Backup Media Allocation Time is the date/time that a piece of media was first allocated or had it's first backup written to it.  Once the media expires it will have a new allocation date/time when it is resued.  Thus, as a scratch tape this is not the write timeframe to use.

Backup Media Expiration Time and Physical Expiration Time produce zero results.

There doesn't appear to be a time based record that I can select that is appropriate for a scratch tape or is there?

[payners · Accepted solution]

Try using backup media snapshot time as the time frame. This will tell you how many tapes were in whatever volume pools you filter for at the snapshot time. By default you will have one snapshot a day for media collection.

[thesanman]

That's it; many thanks.  I misread the definition of the "snapshot" time so that it wasn't relevant.

As it turns out grouping by 1 day works but when you start grouping by (say) 1 week the granularity drops off a bit.  Never mind, a good exercise.