OpsCenter is a Symantec product that makes reports for various backup products including Symantec NetBackup. I recently decided that I wanted to improve the reporting of our backups so looked into playing with OpsCenter. It turns out that it’s not actually that configurable, which is a shame as it’s mostly quite good.
It does however use a standard RDBMS that appears to be an OEMed version of Sybase’s SQL Anywhere to store the data. I thought: great, now I’ll be able to use my own tools to query and report on the backend. I want to make pretty pie charts, report on total data transferred and as well as actual important things like jobs that have failed.
I did a bit of light googling without much success; however I was convinced that I could configure an ODBC driver on Windows to talk to the database so that Crystal Reports could create said pie charts!
I then remembered, we pay quite a substantial amount of money to Symantec for support. I thought, amazing I’ll just ask them: they can tell me how to configure the ODBC driver and save me a bunch of time figuring it out! Roll forward one month of emails (they don’t seem to like the phone), and I got this conclusion:
On 2010-09-13 06:21, enterprise_support@symantec.com wrote:
> Further to our discussion regarding this case, it has been confirmed
> by backline that we can only provide you the ODBC drivers for the
> OpsCenter(As ****** has already sent to you), however unfortunately we
> cannot support or provide the technical know how regarding integrating
> OpsCenter database with any third party front end reporting software
> like Crystal Reports.So much for support! The age old saying: if you want something done, do it yourself, thus I have documented ODBC 2 OpsCenter Access for anyone else out there that needs it! I really wish I could use something more free to do all this stuff.
