Hello Again,
A query I often here is, "how can I accurately monitor DPM?", and this is actually more difficult than it sounds. If you only have one DPM server, it is quite easy to monitor the state of your backups directly but if you have hundreds of protected data sources across multiple DPM servers, you'll one one central place to monitor them. The logical place to perform this monitoring is in Operations Manager, especially as there is a DPM management pack for monitoring DPM, however there are a couple problems with this.
1. The Microsoft DPM management pack monitors the state of a data source based on event logs. In my opinion, this is not the best way to monitor a protected data source as I have noticed many occasions where the state of the data source in DPM does not match the state on Operations Manager.
2. There is no reports included with the current MS DPM management pack. And even if there were, they potentially would not be accurate as the state of the data sources is not being accurately tracked (point 1).
To address issue 1, I developed a monitor in Operations Manager that utilizes PowerShell to accurately track the state of DPM data sources. Now, normally this would not be recommended as traditionally you would target the monitor at the data source class, which would be very bad, as the PowerShell monitoring script would run once for each data source. This would mean that if you had 100 data sources on a DPM server, the script would run 100 times at every monitoring interval which could be as often as every 10-15 minutes. To get round this problem I have utilized cookdown in my monitor which basically means I can run a PowerShell script once at every monitoring interval and return the state of all the data sources on a DPM server. The monitor is configured to run every 15 minutes by default as protection can be configured as regular as every 15 minutes on some data sources.
I have found the solution to work very well as there is very little impact on the DPM server and you always have a true reflection of the state of your data source in Operations Manager. If accurate reporting on data source state from OpsMgr is important to you, I would also disable the deafult event log monitors in the MS DPM management pack. Although these monitors can tell you what specifically is wrong with a data source, they can also be mis-informative and inaccurate. In my experience, having extremely accurate but slightly less detailed monitoring is far better than more detailed but inaccurate monitoring. Although my monitor will not tell you why a data source is in a critical state, at least you can be sure it actually is in a critical state and needs to be troubleshooted.
You can download the management pack that contains the cookdown PowerShell monitor from the Management Packs folder on the Downloads page, http://www.scdpmonline.org/downloads.aspx; it is named SCDPMOnline.DataSourceMonitoring.xml.zip. As an added bonus, I have also included a DPM availability report.
If you just want to view and download the full script, click here. http://www.scdpmonline.org/DPM-Monitoring-Script-For-OpsMgr.aspx
To address issue 2, I developed status reports for DPM data sources. Visit my "Centralise DPM Availabilty Reporting" artcile here, http://www.scdpmonline.org/centralise-dpm-availability-reporting.aspx, for more details. This report is also included in MP above.
For more information on cookdown in OpsMgr, check out this article. http://www.systemcentercentral.com/BlogDetails/tabid/143/IndexID/21670/Default.aspx
Enjoy!
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David Allen
MVP System Center Operations Manager
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