Monday 13 June 2011

Sometimes you want Backup Exec back...

So some weeks on and DPM on the whole is everything a backup product should be. There are a few annoyances and a few things that need radical improvement, but on the most important factor - backup reliability, DPM wins hands down.

One area though that Backup Exec was MUCH better at is E-Mail Alerting. Firstly, it was more flexible - any SMTP server was OK, and that worked great for us. DPM however only seems to work if it's pointed at an Exchange based environment - which was a bit annoying since that's not really how I wanted it done. I guess that's the side effect of the "optimal for microsoft based workloads" strategy, but nonetheless...

The other bit though is the alerting capability. You can have alerts for 3 categories "Informational" "Warning" and "Critical", and a list of e-mail addresses to send to. You get one list of e-mail addresses and ALL of those addresses can receive the alerts you enable.

You can't set any thresholds, you can't customise the alerts and most annoyingly, it alerts you to both "Problems" and "Resolved". Given it tries to self resolve I was hoping "Critical" would only alert you to issues it has tried to resolve and failed at or cannot resolve because it needs our intervention.

All in all a bit poor and makes me want BEWS back, just for that bit anyhow...

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