Best Practices for Reporting - Catalogic Software

ECX 2.0 Best Practices for Reporting

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? Catalogic Software, Inc TM, 2015. All rights reserved.

This publication contains proprietary and confidential material, and is only for use by licensees of Catalogic DPXTM, Catalogic BEXTM, or Catalogic ECXTM proprietary software systems. This publication may not be reproduced in whole or in part, in any form, except with written permission from Catalogic Software.

Catalogic, Catalogic Software, DPX, BEX, ECX, and NSB are trademarks of Catalogic Software, Inc. Backup Express is a registered trademark of Catalogic Software, Inc. All other company and product names used herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.

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Concepts and Terms

ECX generates reports about the objects and relationships that it catalogs. These include NetApp and VMware storage protection objects. ECX also generates reports about the objects and relationships that are cataloged by a Catalogic DPX master server. These include node configuration, and primary and secondary storage protection objects. When reporting on objects that it has recorded, ECX reads data from a MongoDB database. When reporting on objects that have been recorded by a DPX master server, ECX reads data over the network from the master server itself. For both types of reports ECX writes report data to a MongoDB database. Report output is typically rendered in the management console. But it can also be exported in a raw format to the file system.

Ways of Generating a Report

You can generate ECX reports in two different ways: Select and run a report on demand from the management console's Report tab.

On the Report tab in the ECX user interface, select a report in the Report Browser pane. Then choose your desired parameters and click Run. Wait for the report output to appear in the Report pane. Create and run a report policy from the management console's Plan tab. On the Plan tab in the ECX console, under the All Policies tab, select New > Analyze Data > Report. Then define and save a policy, choosing policy options including reports and schedule. Note that your policy can include multiple reports. To select a customized report, the customized report must be created before defining the policy. When the report policy job has finished, you can view the report output in the management console by selecting the Report tab. Then, in the Views pane, click History and select the report you want to view.

Best Practices for Reporting

To populate your reports with the most current data, Catalog Data policies generally need to be run before initiating the report. For DPX Reports, a NetApp Storage Catalog Policy must be run for the resources that are the targets of DPX Block backups. For DPX reports, the DPX Master Server needs to be registered in ECX, but not cataloged.

To avoid possible resource contention issues, it is a best practice not to run multiple File Analytics reports in parallel, with or without the export option, as these reports might be run against millions of records.

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Performance Impact of the Export Option

The export option, which is available only for the File Analytics reports, allows you to export the resulting list of files to a disk storage location of your choice. You can also specify the format of the exported data, e.g., .csv, .json, or zipped versions of these formats. From the sizing and performance perspectives, export is the most important report option due to the sheer number of files that may be in this list. It is possible for this list to contain hundreds of millions of files. You can use certain report parameters to constrain the size of the result set (NetApp Storage, Volume, etc.). Another aspect of export performance is its need to read the MongoDB source data twice. The first pass of the source data is used to aggregate the data and produce the report that is rendered in the management console. But an effect of this aggregation is that the rendered report simply does not contain the list of files. In the second pass the source data is read essentially unchanged from MongoDB and written to disk. By default the exported file list is written to the ECX appliance's /data/reports directory. However, you can specify another location including an external volume that you've mounted to the appliance. To improve export performance, consider mounting an external volume that is supported by high speed disk storage, or even SSD storage.

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