Managing and Monitoring System Center DPM 2012 with SCOM Part 3

This is the final part of my blog series about 'Managing and Monitoring System Center DPM 2012 with SCOM' and if you haven't read my previous two posts on this topic, then you can get to Part 1 here and Part 2 here - both of which go through the steps required to install the DPM 2012 Management Pack into SCOM along with the DPM 2012 Central Console integration that links the two System Center products together.

In this post I will demonstrate the centralisation of DPM tasks using the SCOM console as the central point of administration.

Open the SCOM Console, click on the ‘Monitoring’ tab on the left and expand the ‘Data Protection Manager 2012’ Management Pack folder. You will notice that you now have separation of the alerts within the DPM Management Pack down to ‘Backup Alerts’ and ‘Infrastructure Alerts’.

The ‘Backup Alerts’ folder and its contents show all alerts pertaining to backup issues such as recovery point creation, replica synchronization, disk backup and tape backup alerts.

The ‘Infrastructure Alerts’ folder shows alerts relating to the Disk Infrastructure, the DPM Server itself, Protected computers and also the Tape infrastructure.

The power of the new DPM 2012 Management Pack along with the DPM 2012 Central Console installed into SCOM is evident when you click on an alert and then look at the actions available to you in the ‘Actions’ pane over on the right hand side of the screen.

You will see that you have your specific ‘Alert Tasks’ actions along with your ‘DPM Data Source Tasks’ pane which both allow you to have a much more granular level of control when troubleshooting and resolving your DPM alerts.

To troubleshoot an alert, highlight the alert in the central window and then click on an action from the ‘Actions’ pane on the right hand side.

For the error above, I’ve clicked on the ‘Run Consistency Check’ action and the DPM server has initiated the consistency check without any other input required from me and has come back with the following message to confirm the consistency check has begun.

Now, if I click on the radio box from the notification above to launch the Jobs View to monitor the progress of jobs on exit, I can see the progress of all current jobs on my DPM 2012 server as shown below

Back in the SCOM Console again, if you click on the ‘View Affected Items’ task from the ‘Alert Tasks’ action pane, it will open up the window below

When this window opens up, you now have access to the three options for this specific alert. These options are: Troubleshoot, Take Recommended Action and Resume Backups.

If you click on the ‘Troubleshoot’ button it will automatically open up the DPM 2012 console with a scoped view of the particular error message directly from the SCOM Console like below

If you click on the 'Take Recommended Action' button, DPM will try to automate the recommended action (if any) for the alert that is raised. In this example, there is no corrective action required.

If you click on the 'Resume Backup' button, DPM will try to resume the backup job that had stopped due to the error.

These are just some of the tasks and actions that you can take with your new DPM 2012 installation once you have it integrated into your SCOM environment. It is worth remembering too that I haven’t needed to log on to any other server than the SCOM server so it is already consolidating the management of two System Center products into one application. Also, with the new DPM 2012 Central Console being able to manage multiple DPM servers including DPM 2010 and DPM 2012 at the same time, you can really see the benefits in upgrading to this latest version sooner rather than later!!