Home > Data Protection > Data Protection (general) > Advanced Anomaly Detection with Data Protection Advisor > Monitoring of data protection elements and objects
With agents installed, the configuration of data protection elements or objects can commence using the discovery wizard in the inventory section of Data Protection Advisor. This article will not provide a detailed process of how to discover elements of the data protection environment. The intention is to highlight the flexibility and customization of Data Protection Advisor that will be of benefit as reporting is provided to the various stakeholders.
There are three main categories for discovered data protection elements are linked to: servers, storage, and switches, as shown in Figure 2.
When running reports, each category is then further divided into smaller categories for granularity and flexibility. For example, Figure 3 shows the discovered NetWorker servers and which have been linked to the NetWorker subcategory/group.
A discovered data protection element can be assigned to multiple groups. This becomes important when providing reporting to stakeholders. For example, a stakeholder may require reporting of backup applications based on the environment, backup application type or both. If a backup server was assigned to a group as shown in Figure 3 the required granularity of report per environment is not possible. This is easily achieved by creating two new groups (such as Production and Dev | Test).
Reporting can now be undertaken by selecting each environment or by selecting the parent NetWorker group.
Alternatively, discovered data protection elements can be assigned to multiple groups. There are numerous ways to create a group structure that addresses the reporting requirements of the stakeholders and the organization. Set aside time to consider the reporting requirements and customize the group structure to provide maximum flexibility when it comes to creating reports for the stakeholders.
Assigning protection elements or applications to groups is a static assignment and for most environments will work very well. For others, there is an additional capability within Data Protection Advisor to create groups dynamically and this is achieved using Smart Groups.