EOL Asset DB – backup reviews

The IT Assets Database was replaced by the IT Admins CMDB and is EOL / End of Life, no further development will be done on this project.

The use of the module is a bit specific. You will need to have Veritas Backup Exec in use and a single job per server (physical or virtual) to fully utilize this module. Of course, all is open source and you can adjust it to your own needs or even improve it. The following will only show you how it currently is designed.

So – how does it actually work?

Your backup jobs in Veritas are supposed to start with the servername they actually back up. In our case example we assume this and actually assume you do a weekly review on Monday if the full backup of the weekend was successful, this full backup would start at 6 PM on a Friday evening.

You have all your servers documented in the IT Assets database and checked the box backed up.

Step by step guide for on Mondays review:

  1. Open your Veritas Backup Exec console
    1. go to the Job Monitor tab
    2. click on Sort and Filter and select Job History and there click on Filter
    3. select Start Time and Enable this filter
    4. chose Within the following date range and then check From and set the date/time to the last Friday e.g. 4.30 PM
    5. You now will see that the Job History filtered down to just those jobs
    6. select one of the entries and then press CNTRL + A to mark all and CNTRL + C to copy the information
    7. open a Notepad editor and insert the copied information
    8. save the file 
  2. Open the IT Assets database and go to the backups module
    1. click on Import Backup report
    2. select the file you just saved
    3. import it
    4. a new / incremented import-ID (first column) will be created and all entries be assigned to it
    5. each row that was in the exported text file will be imported
    6. if a server name could be found in the database, it will be assigned
    7. in case a server should have had an backup but was not in the log it will be mentioned as well
  3. review the information
    1. hit the space bar in the column Job name to find all servers that haven’t been found in the log file
    2. remove the space bar filter with the backspace key and set go to job status – sort the column to find any errors that you need to address

This actually will help you to review a huge amount of backup jobs, you can add technical notes to your reviews and combine it with helpdesk tickets if you want to. Further can you see growth data and current backup data throughout the IT Assets database.

Some companies need to have this information available for some IT audit purposes, this actually can help you accomplishing this task.

Additionally it might be helpful to filter for “Full” jobs or and additional contains text “full” – or have a start-end date/time range you filter for.

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