Monitoring Networker Backups with Nagios

I use snmp. Networker sends traps for configured events, nagios receives them and sends notifications.
It works although it occasionally sends notifications with a slight delay. The nagios agent exists but to my knowledge there are no specific plugins for checking backups in networker.

Maybe look into using Dell EMC's "Data Protection Advisor"

It can provide daily email reports

Just write a script which uses Networker REST API to find out what you want and return the appropriate result according to Nagios plugin API.

you can set a script to be run on the protection policy level. However from nw19.9 onwards it has additional security requirement that the script has to start with "mail", which makes it a weird requirement as it can therefor still be used to run a script instead of "only" a mail notification?

In out case we redirect the backup output for the workflow and the backup action to individual log files for each and every run. It is - alas - not as abundant as the regular logs in the NW jobsdb, but as it is advised against keeping those for longer than 72h, we wanted to have something for easy status of the backups.

@bbeckers1​ 

                        type: NSR Protection Policy;
                        name: whatever_protectpolicy_name_1;
                     comment: ;
        restricted data zone: ;
         Notification action: \
"/usr/bin/mail-nw-notification-log.sh \"${policy}_${workflow}_${action}_${status}\"";
     Notification execute on: completion;
    policy protection period: ;

where the script /usr/bin/mail-nw-notification-log.sh does things like below (only redirecting to individual files underneath directory to be created for that use: /nsr/logs/group_log/), so you could still add additional steps in it or change it altogether, to do whatever. However it does not even show the actual error message for the cause of the backup failure. Also you'd have to keep the workflow and backup action set to their default, inheriting the notification setting from the policy level.

@bbeckers1​ 

And Dell DPA (data protection advisor) is also helpful to create daily reports of the Networker backup status and do whatever you'd like with it, for example using a post command script in the report.

@bbeckers1​ 

Not sure, but whenever I try to add the contents of the script, access to dell.com seems to be restricted? Hence a screenshot of the simple script (which was validated at the time with Dell Support as we ran into the issue that the notifications didn't work anymore due to the aforementioned security enhancements), with some context of the Networker Policy variables available, which are also mentioned in the man page from nsr_notification (man nsr_notification).