Can't figure how to generate an alert when an Avamar backup fails (6.1)

I don't seem to have any problems:

From: dpatest@mycompany.org

Sent: Friday, October 11, 2013 6:02 AM

To: Monitor-Team

Subject: Alert generated for policy EPIC Backup Status

Alert Backup Failed has been generated for policy EPIC
Backup Status

Object: my-avamarutl.mycompany.org

Child object: super-soaker.mycompany.org

Component: Backupjob AIX File System-/hose/

Description: Backup of AIX File System-/hose/ failed

Resolution:

Are you having problems getting the notification or generating the alert?  Can you check your alert log in DPA and see if you have the backup failure?

Basically, you want to monitor the root Avamar instance in the DPA tree for errors, and specify the Avamar backup policy (by name) that you wish to monitor, and route them to email notifications, SNMP traps or whatever you need.  In my case, I created a notification for specific backups that I wanted to track, then created error messages for different groups, to notify the appropriate team.

You may need to create the notification with the 'Administrator' credential, instead of the 'Monitor' role, depending on how you've granted permissions.  You can still have the various alerts sent to different groups or users, however.  I set all of this up during a proof-of-concept with the free trial of DPA - I'm still waiting for my permanent license to re-install all of this.

Let us know if that helps!

Karl

I'm having issues just generating the alert, getting it to send out an email seems like an easy step. I'll take a look and see if the monitor account changes anything for me, though you'd figure an admin level account should be suitable.

In the meantime, what do your analysis rules look like? Host-by-host might be useful late but right now my primary concern is just generating it whenever a scheduled backup fails.

Thanks!

I went through certain guides and tutorials and can't seem to find a suitable solution to your problem. Didn't they provide alert function for DPA 6.1 already? Even the mail like the one karl posted here is what it should look like. But, there are no good tutorials for this.

There are canned rules in DPA, that look like they should work, but don't actually generate any alerts. The names for 'em sound perfect but I'm not sure where to find more information about their actual usage other than what their names seem to indicate.

Yes, I checked and found the same. The rules don't really apply for generating an alert. I don't think there are helpful resources other than the EMC community. If it doesn't help here, it will be very hard to find.

Here are the high-level steps to do this:

- Create a new analysis policy called "Avamar Monitor" under Policies / Analysis Policies / Analysis Policy Library.

- Add the BACKUP FAILED rule to this policy.

- Click on EDIT POLICY BASED ACTIONS and configure it to send an email.

- Change to the APPLIED ANALYSIS POLICIES tab, expand GROUPS / BACKUP SERVERS and click on EMC Avamar.

- On the right hand side, click next to "Applied Policy" so that it changes it from OFF. Select the "Avamar Monitor" policy that you created.

Now when you have a failed backup it should appear under the ADVISOR section in the DPA GUI and an email should be sent. If this is not working then it needs more investigation and perhaps a support ticket.

Let me know how this works out.

Gareth

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I've got a Policy like this that works well but it has hardly any info in the email.

Is there any way to change the subject of the email or put anything from the event log in the email?

Also, it doesn't look like you can change the scope of these alerts either.