Monitoring the back-up
A back-up protects your data so that you can avoid data loss. It is an insurance to avoid disaster. But it is also an important cost driver to keep track of regardless if this is service you pay for or if you manage the back-up yourself in your own datacenter.
Surely you have management tools to manage your back-up and restore routines already. But there are times when one might want to get an overall status report without having to log in to several different tools. One might also want to verify that the right services are backed up. To do this, the back-up information needs to be correlated with the existing IT inventory.
vScope records status updates from common back-up services like Veeam Backup and restore and vRanger, and breaks down the information into useful “tags” which can be used for sorting, filtering, reporting and much more.
As for everything else in vScope, the applications keeps a historical time-log over your backup status information. Furthermore, by using the cleaning-up feature, vScope also lets you re-claim the comment capabilities in the VMware vCenter, which is often cluttered with long status info.
Having a good understanding of your back-ups brings a lot of value:
- Avoid data loss. Of course, this is why you have a back-up service in the first place, but with vScope help you make sure you are backing up the right things and it also tracks relevant configuration changes
- Cost control for outsourced services. Identify costly redundant back-up and only pay for what you need!
- Identify servers where there is no backup
- Faster recovery. Track history to see where configuration has changed
- Re-claim the comment fields in vCenter
- Include back-up status in your reporting and decision-making material
- Report back-up incidents (but we bet your existing back-up management tool does this too…)
