DPN Report

DPN Report

The DPN summary report is a good way to see various statistics related to backups. It is ran by going to Tools --> Manage Report and selecting Activities - DPN Summary. To get a daily report, I select the period between backup start time and end time. By default it selects the last 24 hours, which I have find to be a good setting.

The DPN summary report can be exported as a CSV file and opened with Excel. However, there is a lot of data in the report and it is up to the administrator to determine what information he or she needs out of it.

Here is what I do with a DPN Summary report:

1) Remove all columns except the following: Host, Seconds, NumFiles, ModSent, PcntCommon. I don't find much useful informatino in any of the other colums.
2) Add two new columns: Minutes and Mbytes.
3) Minutes is calcualted by the following formula: Seconds/60. I find that expressing the backup duration in minutes is the best way to get a good picture of how long backups too. With Avamar, unlike other traditional backup softwares, successfull backups can range from 2 minutes to several hours. Expressing it in hours make it difficult for me visualize 0.03 of an hour.
4) MBytes is calculated by the following formula: ModSent/(1024 ^2). ModSent is the amount of backup data after deduplication that was sent over the network for a particular host. Avamar is very efficient at deduplication, so backups can range from 1 MB to several GB. Expressing it in GB make it hard for me to visualize 0.03 GB of data. I find it easier to work with whole numbers.

Using this method I am able to sort the data and determine which servers took the longest to backup and which servers backed up the most data. I can also find out which server has the most unique data. It can also be used to calculate the right settings for f_cache and p_cache by seeing how long a backup takes and how many files (NumFiles) are there on the server.

It's a good practice to run the DPN summary report on a daily basis to see if certain clients are not overwhelming the Avamar with too much data, or taking too long.