Veritas NetBackup™ WebSocket Service (NBWSS) Reference Guide

Last Published:
Product(s): NetBackup (8.1)

NBWSS notifications

When NetBackup is connected to an NBWSS endpoint, the endpoint receives notifications from NetBackup in the form of a NOTIFICATION REQUEST message. When the endpoint receives the notification, the endpoint should respond with a NOTFICATION RESPONSE message.

Table: NetBackup notification types describes the types of notifications that NetBackup sends.

Table: NetBackup notification types

Notification types

Description

NetBackup job notifications

When a job starts, NetBackup issues a notification of the job's current state: "QUEUED", "ACTIVE", or "DONE". Note that NetBackup polls for the job's state at regular intervals.

When a job completes, NetBackup issues a notification that the job's state is "DONE". NetBackup issues this notification whether the job succeeded or failed.

NetBackup backup image notifications

When NetBackup creates a backup image, it issues a notification that the image state is "CREATE" or "UPDATE".

When a backup image is updated, NetBackup issues a notification that the image state is "UPDATE".

When a backup image is deleted, NetBackup issues a notification that the image state is "DELETE".

When an image copy expires, if all remaining local copies are replica copies that cannot be restored, NetBackup issues the notification "NO_LOCAL_COPY_AVAILABLE".

Notification message format

A. Notification Request

NetBackup sends notifications to an endpoint in the form of a NOTIFICATION REQUEST message. This message may have one or more notifications within its payload.

The following is an example of a notification request:

{
      "version": "1.0",
      "id": "EDD85CD7-8553-47E4-8A19-01C65092F220",
      "type": "NOTIFICATION",
      "subType": "REQUEST",
      "timeStamp": 1459811679,
      "payload": [
            {
                  "notificationType": "INFO",
                  "object": "JOB",
                  "data": [
                        {
                              "scheduleType": "ST_FULL",
                              "clientName": "mserver2.acme.com",
                              "status": 0,
                              "startTime": 1459829674,
                              "state": "ACTIVE",
                              "policyName": "vmware2",
                              "parentJobId": 144,
                              "jobId": 144,
                              "policyType": "VMWARE",
                              "jobType": "BACKUP"
                        }
                  ]
            }
      ]
}

In request messages, the "payload" value type is an array. Each element of the array holds a different notification object type ("JOB" or "IMAGE"). The element has all notifications that are related to that object type. This array allows NetBackup to batch together notifications of a similar type.

For example, for job start and job done, the payload has one element: a notification object of type "JOB". Within the data section of the "JOB" notification object, there are two elements, one for each notification. For an example of batched notifications in one message, see "Multiple notifications in one message" in the following topic:

See Other NetBackup notification messages.

Each notification object has the following fields:

  • notificationType:

    A string that displays the type of notification. In this release, the only type is "INFO".

  • object:

    A string that displays the notification's object. In this release, the only objects are "JOB" and "IMAGE".

  • data:

    An array that contains the information for each object type. Each data array element is a separate notification. The fields in the data array are specific to each type of notification.

    See Examples of NBWSS messages.

B. Notification Response

For each notification request, a NOTIFICATION RESPONSE message is expected. The "id" field of this response should be the same as the "id" of the request and the "payload" field should be an empty array.

For example:

 {
      "version": "1.0",
      "id": "EDD85CD7-8553-47E4-8A19-01C65092F220",
      "type": "NOTIFICATION",
      "subType": "RESPONSE",
      "timeStamp": 1445036999,
      "payload": []
}

When NetBackup receives the response, the notifications that were sent within the request are considered acknowledged and new notifications can then be sent as they occur. If a notification request is not acknowledged within the configured time period, the notification is resent. No new notifications are sent to that endpoint until the notification is acknowledged.

The time period can be configured in the nbwss.properties file by means of the notification.scheduledRate option. The default is 5 seconds. The following topic contains more information on the options in the nbwss.properties file:

See Configuring the properties of the NetBackup WebSocket Service (NBWSS).

Guaranteed delivery

To avoid delivery problems, NetBackup guarantees delivery of notifications in the following cases: the connection between NetBackup and the endpoint drops, the endpoint server goes offline, or a problem occurs with NetBackup Web Services. If an endpoint server is offline, the notifications go to the next endpoint server in the server group.

See Notes on NetBackup connections to cloud-applications.