Netbackup

This is a quick guide on how to configure an ODBC connection from windows to a Symantec OpsCenter Server. OpsCenter is a Symantec product that integrates various backup products including Netbackup to generate various reports and warnings about how the systems are performing. It used to be a purchasable option with NetBackup 6, however since the release of NetBackup 7 a cut down version is bundled in. It works quite well and can generate pretty reports in various forms and do various things to them. However it’s not very customisable. OpsCenter actually uses SQL Anywhere RDBMS as a back end for all the data. Thus if ODBC is configured anything can query the very same data and produce reports. I’m going to use crystal reports to generate many pretty pie charts.

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.