5 0 0:Monitoring and Reporting
Overview
SEP sesam enables you to easily monitor your entire SEP sesam environment via the Web UI or SEP sesam GUI. Various monitoring features and real-time monitoring capabilities provide a complete overview of your environment as well as valuable insights into the KPIs of the backup and restore process to effectively manage, control, monitor and restore backups.
With reports, you can not only check the details of all events, but also get an overview of all active jobs, next events, and different states, e.g., data store status, backups, migrations, etc. You can send these reports and log files in the form of email notifications.
Note that the options (and operations) available after login may differ depending on the user type. Other Web UI and GUI display restrictions may depend on the custom roles with specific permissions and the UI mode.
For details, see About Authentication and Authorization and User Roles and Permissions.
Monitoring the SEP sesam environment
You can monitor your SEP sesam environment via SEP sesam GUI or via Web UI.
Note that all monitoring, reporting and notifications functionality accessible in the SEP sesam GUI is also accessible in Web UI with the advantages of being user-friendly and visually attractive, providing immediate access to Web UI from mobile browsers and being easily accessible to anyone you authorize.
Monitoring in Web UI
- Web UI access
When running the SEP sesam GUI as superuser or administrator, the Web UI landing page opens by default with a link to the Web UI (and links to documentation, etc.). You can also access the online Web UI from the GUI by clicking the first icon – dashboard – in the toolbar or by selecting Dashboard in Main Selection -> Monitoring. Or simply enter the following information in the browser address bar: http://[servername]:11401/sep/ui or https://[servername]:11401/sep/ui.
If you cannot access the web Restore Assistant, check that you have been given the appropriate permissions to restore.
- Web UI Status, Dashboard and Monitoring
Web UI displays all important key information for your environment with a standard dashboard for easy visualization of job completion status, errors, storage usage and more, based on metrics updated in real-time.
- You can monitor your backup infrastructure on a daily/weekly/monthly basis.
- You can monitor the status of SEP sesam jobs, such as backups, restores, etc., under various menus:
- Status (default start page) provides a status overview of your jobs, data stores, events, clients, etc. See Web UI: Status.
- The Dashboard allows you to check that all your backups and restores have completed successfully and view statistics on the total size of backed up and restored data; see Web UI: Dashboard.
- Monitoring provides a submenu with several options that allow you to check the details and status of the listed events and active jobs (backups, restores, migrations, replications, and media actions). In v. ≥ 5.0.0 Jaglion, you can also perform various actions such as running or locking backups, restarting failed jobs, starting restores, etc., if you have the appropriate permissions. For details, see Monitoring in Web UI.
- You can expand the charts for better readability, generate reports, and filter the data.
- For more details on Web UI and its various report widgets, see SEP sesam Web UI.
Monitoring in GUI
SEP sesam GUI provides monitoring capabilities for data protection activities, performance, and resource usage. The Main Selection navigation pane (on the left side of the GUI window) is used to navigate through the components of the SEP sesam system. These include Clients, Data Stores, Loaders, Drives, Media Pools, Tasks, and Scheduling, and provide the following dedicated views for monitoring SEP sesam environment.
- Monitoring
SEP sesam GUI Monitoring allows you to check the latest backup status and the status of SEP sesam processes, monitor drives, access the online dashboard, and check notifications (see the section Notification Center). You can search for and/or filter and export the data for reporting and analysis.
- Job State
You can also monitor the status of SEP sesam jobs, such as backups, restores, and migrations, by expanding the GUI item Job State and selecting All results to view details on all jobs, such as the job ID, event type (backup, command, migration, restore, etc.), job status (successful or not), object (what was processed), task (its name, job's duration, start and end time), and other details.
Clicking the sub-item (Backups, Restores, Migrations and Replications, or Media Actions) provides detailed information on the selected job. For example, Backups provides detailed information on all backup jobs, including the task name, date of the last full backup, backup level, data size, throughput, assigned media pool, etc.
You can filter each status view to include only the tasks, status, clients, etc., that match certain criteria.
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You can easily print or export different reports, as described in the section SEP sesam reports. |
Logging
The Logging view in the GUI and the System logs in the Web UI are the central place to find information about what is going on in your SEP sesam environment. SEP sesam creates the following protocols or log files for each backup day: the status file – State (<date of day>.status), the Day Log (<date of day>.prt), and the Error Log (<date of day>).
- State
- This detailed status log has one line written for each backup in chronological order.
- Day Log
- All SEP sesam modules write messages with a timestamp attached to it for each backup day. Each message contains a unique code consisting of the message type (I=information, W=warning, E=error ), number, and originating module. You can filter the day log by using the time selection (the from and to date) and the search.
- Error Log
- Contains a record of the critical errors that occurred during the backup day. This log is a subset of the entire day log where only error messages are recorded.
SEP sesam log files are used to detect operations that have caused errors or malfunctions, for example, in case of a failed backup. For details, see Analyzing SEP sesam Log Files and Tips for Backup Troubleshooting.
The log files are stored on the backup server in <SESAM ROOT>/var/prot
. They can be printed out or sent by email.
If you want more information about specific events or modules, or or if you are asked by support to diagnose your specific problem, you can run SEP sesam with a higher log level than the default (0 for backup and restore). Note that increasing the log level increases the amount of information being logged and may negatively affect the performance of SEP sesam. For details, see Setting Log Level.
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You can also generate audit logs to record every action that was triggered by a user in the SEP sesam GUI and Web UI (e.g., triggering a restore or deleting a data store). Audit logs ensure data integrity by providing a complete track record of data-related operations, helping to increase security and compliance. For details, see Audit Logging. |
It is recommended to configure the interfaces (Alarm, Disaster and/or Notify) to automate the sending of email reports of errors and license violations, as well as log files, and to help carry out the disaster recovery process in case of a SEP sesam Server breakdown. See section Email notifications.
You can check the log information of the SEP sesam Server interfaces by selecting the target interface (Alarm, Disaster or Notify) in the GUI under Main Selection -> Interfaces or in the Web UI under System logs. For details, see Logging in the GUI and System logs in the Web UI.
Email notifications
SEP sesam allows you to send the logging messages (daily protocol, events and errors) to an email account. This feature is based on interface scripts that have to be activated via the GUI or manually by copying the templates that are available in the SEP sesam directory <SESAM_ROOT>/skel/templates
. For details, see Configuring interfaces.
SEP sesam interfaces require a configured email account to be able to send the selected notifications by email. You can configure it from the menu bar -> Configuration -> E-mail Settings, select the Use Sesam mail program option, click New and then configure the account with the account name sesam (the default email account; lowercase). For details, see Configuring email account and recipients.
It is recommended to configure the following interfaces to receive a daily log and notifications when certain events happen in the SEP sesam environment.
- sm_notify: Notify is executed on the SEP sesam Server. It can be used for reporting on successfully finished and erroneous events, such as backup, restore, migration, media initialization, and start/finish of a NEWDAY event.
- sm_alarm: Alarm is executed on the SEP sesam Server to warn the system administrator when a fatal error occurs or when there is a license violation.
- sm_disaster: This interface must be properly configured to help carry out the disaster recovery process. For details on how to prepare for it, see SEP sesam Server Disaster Recovery. The disaster interface sends an email describing the recovery procedure in the event of a disaster and an attachment containing the SEP sesam bootstrap database with all essential data for disaster recovery.
Click the right "Expand" button to view an example of a failed jobs report
Click the right "Expand" button to view a sample disaster log
For details on how to configure the interface scripts, see Configuring interfaces.
SEP sesam reports
SEP sesam reports provide various information on your backup environment. For example, you can check the status of the last backup, check which clients in your network are not configured for backup, data storage usage, and much more.
Web UI reports
SEP sesam Web UI provides various reports by clicking Reports in the left navigation menu of the Web UI (browser: https://[servername]:11401/sep/ui/#/server-report).
The following reports are available as a drop-down list in the upper left corner: Available Media Report, Backup Storage Report, Clients Report, Failed Jobs Report, Jobs Overview Report, Readcheck Report, Used Media Report, License Report (MSP Unit or Volume Frontside).
Reports can be filtered using the date range picker or selector or by sesam_date, start_time, stop_time. For details, see SEP sesam Web UI Reports.
You can send reports in the form of email notifications, as described in Email notifications.
GUI reports
Depending on what you want to check, you can define the criteria and generate various types of reports using the SEP sesam GUI, including:
- Location reports
- License reports
- Client reports
- License reports
- All results list
- Backups list
- Restores list
- Migrations and Replications list
- Media Actions list
You can manage GUI reports in the following ways.
- By generating a report for each client or location: Main Selection -> Topology -> Location/Clients, right-click the client/location and then select Client/Location Report.
- By printing or exporting reports: Use the Print or Export button in the top right corner of the content pane. You can export reports in excel or csv format.
- By sending email notifications, as described in Email notifications.
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You can change the level of reported messages for a backup or restore session by changing the log level. For details, see Setting the Log Level. |
Additionally, you can use the SEP sesam logs to check the recorded events and troubleshoot possible problems, as described above in Logging.
Notification Center
The Notification Center is used to dynamically send different types of messages – notifications from SEP sesam Server to all open GUIs. These messages inform the user about license violations, unconfigured interfaces, etc., and contain other important information, such as the announcement of a new release or notification of a bug. The notifications are sent via RSS feeds. You can subscribe to a SEP sesam RSS feed via your email application or web browser, see Subscribing to SEP sesam RSS feeds.
Notifications can be accessed in the Web UI (by clicking the notification icon in the upper right corner or via the left menu -> Notifications) and in SEP sesam GUI (in the upper right corner by clicking the flag, under Monitoring -> Notification Center, or from the menu bar -> Window -> Show Notification Center). For more details, see Notifications in the Web UI and Notification Center in the GUI.
See also
SEP sesam Web UI – User Roles and Permissions – How to configure Mail Notification – Configuration: Interfaces – Setting Log Level – Audit Logging