Tape Drive Utilization Opscenter 7.5.x.x revisited

[Vnktm]

As per Experts in Symantec, Drive utilzation in VBR and Opscenter is calculated as mentioned below

"OpsCenter does collect the backup job utilization from the NetBackup “bperror” information just like VBR did. 
VBR and OpsCenter tracks when the job actually “started writing” and “successfully wrote”.
Just the time when backup data is actively being written to the tape."

The default tape drive utilization report gives a heatmap and cannot be exported to a excel file with data. Addtionally it gives drive utilization on each media server as against drive utilization for each drive in the library. Consider a huge environment with large number of SAN mediaservers and LAN Media servers.
Addtionally values like 5% 7% 12% and in rare cases 25 % seems untrue.

When I try to create a custom report in Opscenter 7.1.0.4 it only gave drive utilzation of 0 % or 100 % .  (PFA)

Create New Report
Create a Custom Report
Category - Backup/Recovery
SubCategory - Tape Drive
Report View Type - Historical
Relative TimeFrame Previous 2 Weeks
Time Frame Group by 1 "Hour of day Average" 
Next
Report on Tape Drive Name
X-Axis - Tape Drive Snapshot time
Y-Axis  - "Tape Drive in Use"  - Only Count and Total Option avaiable (In Opscenter 7.1 and VBR we had the option of Percentage)

Export to an excel file to review the values.

In Opscenter 7.5.
The above report gives values starting from 0 to mostly being being below 10 as an average of an environment have more than 80 drives being backing up 75 TB of Data daily in a

24 hours backup windows seems not true. Example a value of 3.4 . How should one understand if the drive is over utilized or not.

If the Time Frame  is Group by 1 "Hour of day Total"

gives a value staring from 0 - maximum being 100 for a 2 week period depending on drive usage per hour. With this it is not clear whether a particular drive is busy all the time

 or some hours of the day.

This report was exceptional in VBR where it calculated Percentage tape drive utilization. Variations between drive utilization could be easily seen as to when the drive

utilization was more for the environment and when it was less and whether more tuning was required or addtional tape drives required to be procured.

Opscenter 7.5.x.x has removed the Percentage option mentioned above (which did not work in Opscenter 7.1.0.4 as it gave either 0% or 100%)

Attaching reports generated by VBR (Values are derived from VBR output) , Opscenter 7.1.0.4 and 7.5.0.1 (hour of day average and hourof day total)

Any suggestions in this regard is very much appreciated.

[Vnktm]

Any inputs or experiences please.

TIA.

[RonCaplinger]

I'm using OpsCenter Analytics 7.1.0.2.

The standard Tape Drive Throughput and Tape Drive Utilization reports cannot be exported in any format except HTML.

Note, however, that you can use these reports somewhat, by changing the values for "Realtive TimeFrame" or "Absolute TimeFrame" to a 24-hour period, then change the "TimeFrame Goup by" field "Hours of day average".

To the best of my knowledge, there is no way to generate the type of report you are looking for in OpsCenter Analytics to be exproted, unless you want to deal with custom SQL statements.  I can't help with that, I don't know SQL well enough to mess with it.

The "Tape drive in use" field for the custom report is a yes/no, 0/1, etc. field, from what I can tell.  It is not storing a value such as the number of minutes or seconds the drive was used, so the field can either be yes (100%) or no (0%), which is why you are getting seeing reports like the ones you attached.