How to manage Netbackup email notifications

Description

NetBackup Email Notifications Settings and Their Behaviors

This article is presented to address the lack of clarity in the e-mail notification settings that are available in the NetBackup GUI under Host Properties both for the master server and clients. These settings can override each other and, without a clear understanding of their purpose, can become quite complex to troubleshoot. This data is presented in both textual and tabular form in such a way that helps expedite the troubleshooting process when a customer is not getting the expected emails or is getting more emails than intended.

This article does not cover installing BLAT or configuring NBMAIL on Windows. For the notes on BLAT and NBMAIL reference the following KB article:

• Reference: How to configure email notifications for Windows clients using BLAT and nbmail.cmd in NetBackup - https://www.veritas.com/support/en_US/article.100016001

This article applies to all currently supported versions of NetBackup at the time of its writing (02/13/2020). All patch levels and all platforms of NetBackup should have the same behavior using these settings. If this is found not to be the case, please contact support so that corrections may be made.

MASTER SERVER PROPERTIES SETTINGS

Global Attributes

The Global Attributes section contains the Administrator's e-mail address field which will be the email NetBackup feeds to nbmail.cmd when a backup finishes with a nonzero status. Putting an email address in Global Attributes will cause NetBackup to send e-mail notifications for only non-zero backup statuses.

Universal Settings

The Universal Settings section contains the Client administrator's e-mail field which will be the email address NetBackup feeds to nbmail.cmd when a backup finishes with any status. Putting the email address in Universal Settings will cause NetBackup to send e-mail notifications for all backup statuses. This field exists on each client and could be setup to email the client's administrator with backup updates for all backups, failed and successful.

Note: Using Universal Settings > Client administrator's e-mail in conjunction with Global Attributes > Administrator's e-mail address will not cause duplicate e-mails to be sent for one failed job.

Client sends mail and Server sends mail indicate whether the client that's being backed up will send the e-mail or the master server will. It's important to ensure that your clients and server have these set the same in a Windows environment where only the master is setup to utilize blat.

Example: If you set the master server to Server sends mail and the client to Client sends mail, even without specifying an email address into Client administrator's e-mail, the notification will fail. To fix this problem, set the client's Universal Settings to Server sends mail, or if the mailer is the client set the master's to Client sends mail.

CLIENT SETTINGS

The purpose of the Client administrator's e-mail setting is to allow a NetBackup administrator to be set in the Master Host Properties> Universal Settings in addition to each client's administrator so they can be notified on the backup statuses for their clients. This will send emails for all status codes for this client to the client's administrator.

Client sends mail and Server sends mail indicate whether the client that's being backed up will send the e-mail or the master server will. It's important to ensure that clients and server have same settings.

On the client, the applicable settings are the following: