Job history data collection

[simonjcook]

Hi there,

I am investigating a means of extracting job history data from a number of servers running various versions of Backup Exec into a central database for reporting purposes.

What I need is something like the facilities of Exec-View 2.5 where I can actually extract the data.

I have never used Exec View 3.0 but am aware of it's existence.
Would this suit my purposes?

I also know the jobhist.dat sits on each server but cannot find a reference to it's structure.
Extracting the data directly from that file would be a good starter.

I have previously written a VB application to parse the BEXxx.txt files and extract the data that way. But I feel there would probably be a more elegant solution.



Regards

Simon J Cook

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[marklonsdale]

Hi Simon

Have you looked at the bemcmd at all ? This give you some ability to pull back job information..

Were basically trying to do a very similar thing to add support for it to our product, but are having some problems with it, so are also exploring goign direct to the datbasae as well.

Mark

 

[simonjcook]

Hi Mark,

Just had a quick look at BEMCMD.exe from BE 8.5.
I have been working with Backup Exec since version 6.11 and never came across that command for extracting data.
Funny isn't it... Should have read the manual...

It looks quite useful but has some shortcomings.
See the example below...

The first step would be to dump a list of the job names and ID's.

bemcmd -o12 -i -c<server name>
bemcmd -o12 -j -c<server name>

load them into a 2 dimensional array and iterate through each job ID in turn.
The related job name should be checked against the returned job data as a check that the correct job has been returned.

bemcmd -o16 -i<id number> -c<server name>

That would return information similar to the following.

Job name :<job name>
Job status :5 (Completed Success)
Server name :<server name>
Device name :40/80GB DLT
Time started :23:00:00
Elapsed time :01:03:35
Bytes processed :2,053,713,500
Estimated bytes :2,053,713,500
Percent complete :100
LogFile name :BEX29.txt
Directories processed:5873
Files processed :180451
Volumes processed :3
Files skipped :0
Files corrupt :0
In use files :24
Return value:1

The above information looks ideal.
However on closer inspection...
There is no date and the byte count is way out (too low).

This may have been fixed in newer versions of BEMCMD.
On the up side we also have the log file name associated with the job.
Any further information required can be extracted directly from the log.

The resulting data can be loaded into a database for reporting.



Regards

Simon J Cook

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[marklonsdale]

Hi Simon

Actually we were looking at doing it a slightly different way.. -o16 appears to be just those jobs that are scheduled to run or currently active.. Am wondering if the number of bytes processed is wrong because of this. That number looks suspiciously like 2^32, so maybe it just sets scheduled jobs to that.

We were interesting in getting the status on those that had completed. The approach that we were looking at taking was

bemcmd -o12 -i

this gives a list of job ids.. Some are dups, so de-dup these. Then run

bemcmd -o21 -i$jobid

This gives you a history id for each instance of that job as a job can obviously have ran many times.

We then run

bemcmd -o21 -hi:$histid

To get the output..

This seems to give us a more accurate bytes processed figure..

Job name :wysdm full
Job status :19 (Completed Success)
Server name :TESTBED
Device name :QUANTUM 1
Time started :13:34:09
Elapsed time :00:13:33
Bytes processed :101,748,809
Estimated bytes :101,748,809
Job log name :Unknown
Directories processed:51
Files processed :722
Files skipped :0
Files corrupt :0
In use files :0
Return value:1

Am interested to know if the same approach works in your environment ? It still looks as though we have the problems of the Times though which is a pain.... In my environment Im not getting a job log name either... Is there something i need to turn onto get this ?

Im fairly new to BackupExec and were using version 9.1

Mark