We all know that one of the biggest frustrations of DPM is that each DPM server has to be managed individually as there is no central console. This also includes reporting and this can be an even bigger frustration as if you have more than one DPM server, you can’t get a single report displaying the status of the protection being provided for a given period.
Although this single report isn’t available in DPM, it is possible to create it in Operations Manager. If you have Operations Manager in your environment and you are using the DPM management pack to monitor and manage your DPM servers and data sources, then you have the availability information you need for a central status report. As Operations Manager monitors the state of the DPM data sources, irrelevant of what DPM server they are on, this state data can be used in an availability report to display the protection status of each and every data source.
What’s crazy about this is how easy it is to do. In Operations Manager you are provided with a generic report library and within this library there is a generic availability report, all you simply need to do is run this report and target it at the DPM data sources that you want to report on. Here is a step-by-step walk through.
1. Open the Operations Manager console and select Reporting from the wonder-bar.
2. Select the Microsoft Generic Report Library, select the Availability Report and the click Open in the Actions menu.
3. When the report opens, simply select the time range that you want to run the report for and select the data source objects that you want to report and click Run.
4. You now have your status report!
5. The report you just generated will show you Downtime and Uptime as both a percentage and as time. Uptime is where protection was being provided with no issues and Downtime is where there was a problem with protecting the data.
This is very useful information but if you have downtime you may want to know when that downtime was for a given data source. Simply click the Availability Tracker link for the data source you want more detailed information on and a new report will be generated showing you a day by day breakdown. You can then select a specific day to get an hour by hour breakdown of the data source status.
Central DPM data source report, done !!!
If you followed my steps above though, you may have noticed that finding the data source objects to run the report on can be very difficult as all OpsMgr objects are available to select. To make this easier for you I have packaged the report into a management pack and added an object filter so that only the data source objects will be displayed.
Download the Management Pack from the Management Pack directory on the Downloads page (registration required) and import into OpsMgr. You will then be able to access the report from the Reporting pane or from a link in the Actions menu when viewing the data source state view.
And when selecting the objects to report on, the search list is filtered to only display data sources.
Hope this makes your reporting a bit easier and a bit more useful for you!
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David Allen
MVP System Center Operations Manager
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