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Veritas NetBackup™ OpsCenter Reporting Guide

Last Published: 2021-03-29

Product(s): NetBackup (9.0.0.1)

Disk and Tape Device Activity > Tape Drive Throughput

This report shows the speed (KB/Sec) at which data backups flow through the tape drives. The report uses the "heat map" concept and depicts ranges of speeds (slow to fast) through configurable shades of green color. Reports are generated based on either Hours-of-Day or Days-of-Week. Advanced averaging logic is used to determine the throughput values for each cell in the report. The averaging is done at an image fragment level ensuring granularity and precision in calculations. The reports can be aggregated and filtered at the Tape Library, Media Server, Drive Type, Logical Drive, and Physical Drive levels. The sort options allow intuitive presentation of voluminous data. These reports are important sources of information for performance analysis and capacity planning activities.

As an example on the analysis that can be performed on this report, suppose you look at an LTO4 drive that can run at 120+MB/sec, having a report that shows only 5 -6 MB/sec would indicate that the drives are not even close to being at the maximum capacity. Adding drives in an environment such as this would not impact the backup window. We see a lot of money being spent on new tape drives when customers have trouble pushing tape drives from years ago. If you cannot push an LTO2 drive, then upgrading to an LTO4 will not benefit you (unless you wanted the hardware encryption option of course). These reports are important sources of information for performance analysis and capacity planning activities.

Note that the Tape Drive Throughput report displays data only till 1 A.M. and not till the time when you run the report. This is because OpsCenter collects data for Tape Drive Throughput report once per day at 1 A.M..after midnight. Therefore the Tape Drive Throughput report is only able to report on data up until 1 AM on that day, even when run with a relative timeframe of Previous 24 hours. Similarly if you run Tape Drive Throughput report at 2 P.M. in the afternoon, the reports display data collected till 1 A.M. only.

Note:

It is recommended that you configure the retention period of error logs in NetBackup as more than 1 day. If the retention period of error logs is less than 24 hours, it may result in data loss for some reports like Drive Throughput.

Figure: Tape Drive Throughput Report shows a sample view of Drive Throughput Report.

Figure: Tape Drive Throughput Report

The following are the details that are associated with the Tape Drive Throughput report:

Report Name	Tape Drive Throughput
Report Category	Disk and Tape Device Activity
Where to Locate	Report > Report Templates > Disk and Tape Device Activity > Tape Drive Throughput report.
Report Purpose	A heat-map report showing drive throughput by library, media server, tape drive and drive type. Darker the color, higher is the throughput for that particular time, for NetBackup servers.
Supported products	NetBackup, NetBackup Master Appliance
Applicable View	Master Server
Report Display	Tabular
Drill down report	None
Can be scheduled	Yes
Supported formats	HTML
Mapping with VBR report	All Reports > Standard Reports > Backups > Tape Devices > Drive Throughput

You can edit the Drive Throughput report to show or hide the columns that you are interested in. All the columns are shown by default. You can also filter the report to view reports of specific master servers. The following table shows the filters for Drive Throughput report and how you can use these filters to view specific data in the report.

Filter	Column	Description
View		Select a view to show data for the selected view in the report. By default All My Views is selected.
Master Server	Master Server	Select one or more master servers to view data for the virtual clients that are backed up by the selected master servers in the report. All master servers that are added to the OpsCenter console are shown in the Value drop-down list .
Policy	Policy Name	Select one or more policy names to view data for the selected policies.
Schedule	Schedule/Level Type	Select one or more schedule or level types to view the data for the configured schedules.
Job	Job Type	Select one or more job types as Archive, Backup, or Restore to view data for the selected job types.
Drive	Drive	Select one or more drives to view the specific data on those drives.
Tape Library	Tape Library Serial Number	Select one or more tape library serial numbers to view the data specific for those tapes.

Example of filter usage: You may run the report for specific policy data classification names to view details only for the specific policy classifications. You may run the report for a specific job type like Backup to view drive throughput details for the backup jobs.

The following report enhancements have been made for the Drive Throughput report:

The option Next has been removed from the drop-down menu for Relative Timeframe. You now cannot enter a relative timeframe like next 2 weeks. This is because the report does not support any futuristic data.

The following filter enhancements have been made for the Drive Throughput report:

Job types which are not applicable for this report are removed from the filter. The supported job types are Backup, Archive, Restore, Backup from Snapshot, Snapshot, Duplicate, and Replication.
UNKNOWN has been added as a value for Schedule Level/Type column in the Schedule filter. You can now filter report data for Schedule Level/Type that is UNKNOWN.