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Does anyone know of a monitoring tool for Backup Exec 12 and BESR 8.5? I'm sick of going through all the email alerts or logging into servers to check the status of my backups.

Servers are Windows Server 2003 and XP workstations

7 Answers 7

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What kind of monitoring do you need that you can't get from the alerts? Do you want to know when a job fails? Succeeds? Alerts support email and pager notifications, so I'm not quite clear on what you're asking for. BackupExec also supports sending SNMP traps. Can you elaborate?

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  • I'm really just looking for a gui that shows success/fail and active backups.
    – Mr Virus
    Oct 22, 2009 at 4:30
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    Why not just install the Backup Exec console onto your PC, then? Oct 22, 2009 at 11:52
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    I'm still confused. BackupExec does have a GUI that shows the job status. It's on the Job Monitor tab, it shows all active and scheduled jobs in the upper pane and all completed jobs (success or failure) in the lower pane. The Alerts tab shows all job errors. Am I still not understanding what you're asking for?
    – joeqwerty
    Oct 22, 2009 at 11:53
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If email alerts aren't cutting it Backup Exec also supports SNMP - see here and here for help from Symantec on setting it up.

You can then tap into it with most systems monitoring software, so you can take your pick. :)

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If you can't find one, you could create your own by piping the alert emails to a script which could log when a backup started, ended, and if it fails send an auxiliary alert to you via email/SMS and such. I used to do this with PHP (for a different application) and added all relevant data to database tables by parsing various parts of the message with regular expressions. I had a simple web GUI driven off the database.

If I still had it I'd offer to give it to you, but here's the barebones of an email script, then you just setup your MTA to deliver notification emails to the script.

#!/usr/bin/php -q
<?php
$fd = fopen("php://stdin", "r");
$message = "";
while (!feof($fd)) {
    $message .= fread($fd, 1024);
}
fclose($fd);
// Do stuff
?

That's how I'd do it on Linux. I believe stdin would still work the same, though the shebang would be different.

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I use zabbix to monitor backupexec jobs. What I did was to enable SNMP in backupexec. So, when it executes a job, it sends a trap that is listened by zabbix, that records the traps on it's database.

So, from zabbix console I can monitor all my environment.

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If you have a system monitor like Nagios already, it's straightforward to set up alerts that will tell you if the backups haven't been updated. I wrote a blog post about how to do this with Nagios.

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I keep coming back to this question and wondering just how many instances of BackupExec are involved here, because you're making it sound like there are vast numbers. This should already be automated and you should not need to go through all the email alerts or log on to the servers or even open the BE console.

I find the simplest solution is a filter for my email (we use Outlook but the principles apply elsewhere). Any emails from the backup systems that include warnings or errors are moved to a separate folder and I get a pop-up telling me about them. That, coupled with a monitoring system that let's me know if the backup hasn't run or completed, lets me see at a glance when things aren't quite right. After all, I'm not really all that interested in the emails telling me the backup was successful.

No rocket science, just a little constructive laziness - the most powerful tool any sysadmin can have.

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You can use CheckCentral for this. You setup your backup emails to be sent to CheckCentral, and then it takes care of logging them as success or failed, and sends a notification if the email is overdue.

Disclaimer: I work for Binary Fortress Software :)

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