DPM 2012 R2 Reporting Improvements

A while back I released a custom DPM report that could be loaded in SSRS. This report is community based and only offered reporting on one DPM server at a time. It was however an improvement over the out of the box DPM reporting. More about the custom DPM report here: https://www.buchatech.com/2014/04/free-dpm-backup-summary-report/ . Finally Microsoft has taken the step to improve the out of the box reporting within DPM. Hats off to the DPM team for stepping up and taking steps to improve this. Recently at TechEd Europe new DPM reporting was announced. It is not available as of now but is coming soon.

The video covering this can be found here starting at 19:43:

Cloud Integrated Data Protection with System Center Data Protection Manager and Microsoft Azure Backup

http://channel9.msdn.com/events/TechEd/Europe/2014/CDP-B334

In this blog post I will take a look at what is coming. As you can see there is some success SLA reporting, protected data source overview on specific workloads such as Exchange, SharePoint and SQL, duration summary in hours, top backup failure reasons, bandwidth, and transfer data, and even data around deduplication! The new reporting will be surfaced in SCOM. This is what the report will look like.

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With the new reporting you can chose to use what is their out of the box or extend this further without any coding. This reporting framework will cover all of your DPM servers because it is surfaced in SCOM. The new reporting leverages the SCOM management pack and the DPM management pack. All of your DPM servers are aggregated up through SCOM and therefore will show up in reports. Below are two diagrams one that breaks down the new reporting framework and one that covers the new reporting architecture:

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To enable the reporting you will need to first have the two DPM management packs loaded in your SCOM deployment. Your DPM servers need to be discovered. You then will need to add a third DPM reporting management pack. The following screenshot shows the new DPM Reporting management pack for SCOM.

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After the new management pack is loaded the some new DPM views are added within the SCOM DW database as seen in the following screenshot. Note that the new reporting has not been released and therefore we may see more changes to the views. The new report can be accessed and used or you can build your own report based on the views using a tool like report builder.

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The new reporting is estimated to be public in January as a part of the next update rollup. Thanks DPM team for making improvements such as this to DPM. If you have specific requests or feedback about what you want to see in DPM reporting feel free to email me.

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DPM 2012 R2 Upgrade unable to connect SSRS. ID: 33431

I recently had to help someone do a DPM upgrade from DPM 2012 SP1 UR3 to DPM 2012 R2. I am a fan of starting fresh when I can but in this case we had no choice but to do an upgrade. We had to first upgrade SQL 2008 R2 to SQL 2012. After upgrading to SQL 2012 and trying to run the DPM upgrade we got the following error regarding SSRS:

“DPM Setup is unable to connect to the specified instance of SQL Server Reporting Service. (ID: 33431)”

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What is happening is that the DPM installer is trying to access the 2008 R2 SSRS even though it no longer exists as SQL has been upgraded to 2012. I manually removed the left over SQL 2008 components and rebooted but this did not help. The DPM installer uses WMI to get information about the SSRS installation during the install, so in order to fix this I had to go into WMI and remove the SQL 2008 references. Here are the steps:

Open the WMI tool:

From the Run window type: wbemtest

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In the namespace type the following:

\\NAMEOFYOURDPMSERVERGOESHERE\root\Microsoft\SqlServer\ReportServer\RS_NAMEOFYOURSQLINSTANCEGOESHERE

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You will now be connected. Click on Query.

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Put in the following query:

SELECT * FROM __NAMESPACE

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You will then see two entries for SSRS that DPM is trying to access. You will see one for v10 and one for v11.

v10 is for SQL server 2008 R2 and v11 is for SQL 2012. We want the DPM installer to connect to SSRS on SQL 2012.

Click the Apply button in the query window and you will see the results.

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Highlight v10 and click the Delete button. Now click Close and click Exit to close out the WMI tool.

Now run the DPM 2012 R2 upgrade again and it should go through without any issues.

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SysCTR 2012 R2 UR2 – SCSM fixes, DPM SRV 03 support, & new SCOM DB Widgets

Microsoft has release UR2 for System Center 2012 R2. There are many good fixes for the System Center products in this release.

For Service Manager a good amount of console issues are resolved including the annoying FullAdapter error. Here is the list:

  • Assume that users have both SMTP and Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) endpoints. When you send email messages to these users from the Service Manager console, Service Manager uses the Lync SIP endpoint as the email address.
  • After you select the Service Requests with Service Level Warning feature, an error occurs about one hour later.
  • After you select the Assigned to me view, a FullAdapter exception occurs about one hour later.
  • When the Service Manager console runs in maximized mode, you encounter one or more of the following issues:When you run PowerShell workflows at the same time, the results are displayed as successful. Actually, the workflows fail.
    • You experience slow performance in the console, and the console consumes excessive CPU resources.
    • Context menus in the console are not displayed as expected, and instead it is displayed at the upper-right hand corner of the main window.
    • Scroll bars for the work items preview pane do not display when you run in full-screen mode. Even if the scroll bars display, they are still inactive and you cannot move the slider.
    • Certain forms or wizards do not display appropriately. Specifically, only the left navigation pane displays and the right area is blank.
    • When you create or edit on a User Prompts page in a request offering, the page is not displayed appropriately.
    • When you scroll on an open work item or a configuration item form, the scrolling does not work. In this case, you can have the mouse held over the scroll bar for scrolling.
  • When a user tries to open an already opened attachment from a work item form, an exception is thrown.
  • After you mark a release record as Closed, the attachment and associated details cannot be retrieved.
  • When you create service requests from Request Offerings, it takes a long time to display the request offerings form.
  • When you try to use a service request template, the console crashes.
  • When you try to create a service request, a NullReferenceException exception is thrown and the console crashes.
  • The Service Manager console shows a generic Microsoft SQL exception instead of the detailed Data Collision exception when you run in a non-English environment.

The DPM update includes support for Windows 2003 Servers. This from the KB article:

DPM 2012 R2 now supports backup and recovery of Windows 2003 servers. In Update Rollup 2, you can now protect Windows Server 2003 by using DPM 2012 R2. The following workloads are also supported in Windows Server 2003:

Microsoft SQL Server 2005, Microsoft SQL Server 2008, Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2

Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007

Other highlights are:  SQL AlwaysOn with Clustering now supported and the ability to schedule backup and CC jobs defined by time windows on individual protection groups. There also are a number of issues that are resolved.

Some highlights from the Operations Manager UR 2 are:

Service Level Objectives (SLO) dashboard load times will be more consistent. When member of a member of a custom Operator role views load slow. This is resolved. There also has been updates to the Unix and Linux monitoring and SQL issues resolved. Something else to note that is new with this SCOM UR is new widgets for the dashboards. Very exciting! Here is a blog specifically about this http://blogs.technet.com/b/momteam/archive/2014/04/24/new-widgets-and-dashboard.aspx and a wiki article http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/24133.operations-manager-dashboard-widgets.aspx with details on them. Here are screenshots of some of the widgets:

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NewSCOmWidget2  NewSCOmWidget3

UR downloads and full details can be found here:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2932881

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Featured on IT PRO Experts

Lee Berg a Systems Management Specialist, active member in the System Center community and now coworker of mine at Concurrency.com has a great YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com//LeeAlanBerg with Microsoft technology videos for the IT Pro community. It features Weekly Service Manager and Private Cloud round up’s, Demos, Reviews, and Interviews. Lee has been doing these IT … Read more

Free SCSM, SCOM, DPM Tools for the Community

Wow what an exciting week in the System Center space! Lately there has been several free tools released for various System Center products in the community. I wanted to mention them here in one blog. Service Manager: Advanced Send Mail This one is very cool and something that has been needed for some time. Big … Read more

DPM as a Distributed Application in SCOM

In Operations Manager 2012 there is something known as a Distributed Application (DA). The purpose of a DA is to give you the overall health of an application made up of different multiple objects. DA’s pull in objects that are already being monitored by SCOM. An example of using a DA could be to provide the health of a web application that consists of backend databases and front end web servers. Both the backend databases and front end web servers are objects that are monitored separately but together make up the entirety of the web application. Monitoring these alone lets you know what the health is of each object but when one of the objects is in a critical state it does not always help put two and two together that these objects make up the components of the web application.

When an infrastructure has multiple DPM servers a DA can be used to get an overall health of your DPM as a service vs… the health of each DPM server through state views trying to track down the root issue. We are going to create a new name for our multiple DPM servers. We need to do this because multiple DPM’s brought together in a DA become a service. We are going to call this "DPM Service". DPM as a DA can be useful for quick spot checking of your DPM service health. Using a DA also allows you to connect relationships between the health of objects that make up DPM. For example you can see the health of disks in the DPM storage pool, tape libraries, SQL databases, protected servers and the DPM servers.

In this post I am going to cover setting up DPM as a DA using the Distributed Application Designer (DAD) and show what it looks like after DPM is a DA. There are a few items that need to be covered before you can setup DPM as a DA. These are:

  • You need to have DPM Central Console installed in SCOM.
  • All DPM servers that will be a part of your DA DPM Service will need to have the SCOM agent installed.
  • Create a custom management pack to store your new DA in SCOM.

Setting up a DPM DA using the Distributed Application Designer

In the SCOM console go to: Authoring.

Right click on Distributed Applications and select Create new distributed application.

The Distributed Application Designer (DAD) will open.

Enter in the information about your DPM Service.

The fields you will need are highlighted in the following screenshot.

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In the Template box, select the template for the starting point of the distributed application. Chose Blank (Advanced).

Choosing advanced is going to give us a blank template to work from and this is what we want.

Select your custom management pack that you made for this DA and click OK.

Now we need to create a couple of component groups. Let’s create the following:

  • Databases
  • Servers

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Protecting Server 2012 VMs on Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V go into Saved State

Problem: A buddy of mine recently ran into an issue were a 2008R2 Hyper-V host was running Server 2012 virtual machines. SCDPM 2012 SP1 was being used to back up all the virtual machines. Some of the virtual machines running Server 2012 would go into a saved state during the backup process. With virtual machine … Read more

Data Protection Manager 2010 Overview Poster

  I was honored to work with Microsoft DPM MVP Yegor Statsev and Sean O Farrell on a DPM 2010 poster. Both Yegor and Sean are great guys and run blogs with lot’s of good information on them. You can find  links to their blogs under the Tech Blog Sites section. Here is a a … Read more

DPM vs. Symantec Backup Exec

Have you ever been asked how DPM holds up to Symantec Backup Exec? I have. Up until today I have not been able to find a decent report about this only forum threads. This is the best comparison I have been able to find on DPM vs. Symantec Backup Exec http://www.milesconsultingcorp.com/MS-Data-Protection-Manager-vs-Symantec-Backup-Exec.aspx . It is by a DPM … Read more

DPM could not connect to SQL Reporting

I needed to pull some reports on our backup in Data Protection Manager. So I clicked on Reporting in Data Protection manager and it threw an error like this:

DPM could not connect to SQL Server Reporting Services server because of IIS

connectivity issues.

On the computer on which the DPM database was created, restart the World

Wide Web Publishing Service. On the Administrative Tools menu, select

Services. Right-click World Wide Web Publishing Service, and then click Start.

Apparently there is a permission requirement in IIS 7 for ISAPI extensions that use a wildcard script. DPM uses this.

So you have to go into IIS 7 and set the permission for script to resolve this. Here are the steps:

Open up Server Manager expand Roles, expand Web Server (IIS).

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