ServerGraph - A TSM Management and Automation tool

Overview

Servergraph is a highly effective browser based reporting and automation tool for managing large TSM environments as well as small single server sites. It extracts data from TSM logs, TSM databases as well as other sources and combines this information together to give you a complete picture of your entire TSM environment. It can issue problem alerts real-time, provide historical trending graphs, automate manual tasks and more. Originally a TSM tool, Servergraph has expanded its support to include Symantec Netbackup, EMC Avamar, TSM Fastback, EMC Networker and EMC Data Domain. This page concentrates on TSM management.

Installation

Servergraph is easy to install. It comes with detailed documentation so there is no point in reproducing it here. Some third party software is required for the install, including MySQL DBMS, Apache web server and Perl. The automatic install will check for these and install them for you, if they do not exist already.
One advantage Servergraph has over other TSM reporting products is that it only needs to be installed on one machine, it does not need agents installed on every TSM server or client.

Features

Servergraph extracts data from the TSM databases and logs and formats that data into its own MySQL database. That minimises the performance overhead on TSM, as data processing and interpretation is carried out away from the TSM databases

ServerGraph Alerting traps all the TSM error messages and picks out the two hundred or so that are important. It can pass these to Tivoli TEC or other messaging products as SNPE alerts.

It is possible to tailor the Servergraph management dashboard, but the default provides lots of useful information, including a summary of the results from the previous day's backups, a 30 day backup history, a summary of the state of the databases and logs and a summary of the state of the tape volume and drives. This lets you get an instant impression of the state of the backups and backup infrastructure on one screen. You can then drill down into most of these summaries and get detail, and extract that detail as Excel or csv files. Dashboard statistics are updated automatically throughout the day.

You can also expand the left hand menu to get details about the whole enterprise, and from individual servers. Expand the 'enterprise' menu then the 'nodes' menu and select 'top 50 storage abusers'. This will list fifty nodes sorted by their 'hog factor', which is the ratio of primary to local storage. I've found this report to be very useful to identify nodes where the retention period is incorrect, and so is keeping backups for far too long.
While the picture above just shows TSM servers, if you run NetBackup, Networker, TSM Fastback, Avamar or Data Domain, ServerGraph gives you a composite picture of how all three are working from one screen

From the same Enterprise menu, select 'Long Term Trends' then highlight '90 days' and you see a report like this

The 'Long Term Trends' option shown above displays charts that illustrate how the capacity of databases, logs and storage pools is changing and when they will run out. This is useful for both Capacity and Budget planning.

Tips

A particularly useful graph is one which shows each node's behavior over 24 hours. This data can be used to detect nodes suffering from speed problems due to incorrect network card settings.

Some of the ServerGraph pages are wider than a screen and you have to scroll right to see the edge. This can be a bit annoying, but you can hide the Left side navigation menu by simply clicking on the collapse icon on the navigation bar. This gives you full screen viewing of reports and dashboards. Click again to see the navigation tree.

ServerGraph communicates with the TSM servers on port 1500 by default. You must ensure that this port is open and accessible through your firewalls.

ServerGraph 7.0 New Features

The following is an overview of some of the new features in ServerGraph 6.2 and 7

Real time reporting and alerting - Servergraph will report on missed and failed backups in real time, and automatically issue alerts. Failures can be categorised by impact, for example, whole server failed, filespace failed or individual files missed, to allow investigation to be prioritised.
Billing can also be automated, and be based on either backend capacity used or bandwidth consumed.

Another useful feature is the data movement report. This measures how fast a client is backing up relative to the average backup time and also displays where the client is spending time waiting.

The Servergraph TSM Administration Console provides central access to all TSM servers for complete management giving you the ability to issue commands, check activity logs and manage your enterprise from a single point.
This tool is intended to be a complete replacement for the ISC providing everything you need to setup, configure and management TSM servers from a highly secure interface.

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