I was trying to think of which crazy-cool complex report I could post on the blog but it dawned on me that there is a lot of power in just the simple reports. So that's where I'll start. Here's a dead simple report that simply shows how much you've backed up each day for the last month. Think of it as the report that you want everyone in IT to have so if you were to stop someone in the hallway and ask "how much data did we backup last night?" They would have the answer at the tip of their tongue. Sounds simple enough but if you really dig down there is a lot of complexity under this report. You’re environment may be several backup domains (NBU Masters), thousands of clients, dozens of applications, multiple geographies, and so on. But here all that stuff is one simple blue bar for each day.
Let’s take it a step further now. So maybe you need to know more than just how much you backed up. You want to answer the question “how much data did we backup last night in each of our major datacenters across the globe?”. Same report but we put it in the context of what we call a “View”. The View gives you the ability to render that same report with colors to represent each major geography that you have datacenters.
That’s all great but let’s say my job is to run the data centers in Asia. I’ve got a pretty busy job so I don’t really need to know about the rest of the world (I’ll let my boss worry about that). So I simply click on “Asia/Pac” on that geographical report and I have the same report showing just my own region.
This seems like a good way to start showing Backup Reporter reports and is my favorite way of looking at a complex backup environment in a dead simple way.
Let’s take it a step further now. So maybe you need to know more than just how much you backed up. You want to answer the question “how much data did we backup last night in each of our major datacenters across the globe?”. Same report but we put it in the context of what we call a “View”. The View gives you the ability to render that same report with colors to represent each major geography that you have datacenters.
That’s all great but let’s say my job is to run the data centers in Asia. I’ve got a pretty busy job so I don’t really need to know about the rest of the world (I’ll let my boss worry about that). So I simply click on “Asia/Pac” on that geographical report and I have the same report showing just my own region.
This seems like a good way to start showing Backup Reporter reports and is my favorite way of looking at a complex backup environment in a dead simple way.
