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Data Protection Advisor Smart Groups enables a group to be dynamically populated based on user defined criteria and from the results of reports based on a defined frequency. For large and dynamic environments, Smart Groups ensure minimal administrative input is required for monitoring the backup environments. For example, Smart Groups are ideal allowing various application owners/users of Data Protection Advisor to view only their data protection assets, using them to define groups that constitute the critical applications for the organization or help to improve the organization’s configuration management database (CMDB).
A Smart Group can be created by a Data Protection Advisor user with administrative privileges and is used to obtain a list of objects by running a report where the results are filtered based on a criterion. When creating a Smart Group, the returned objects list can be based on a single level or multi levels.
In Figure 4, a Smart Group called SQL is created with the following parameters. A single-level Smart Group is selected and based on the Backup Client Configuration report, where the selected scope is the Backup Server, which in this example is NetWorker. Clients are filtered based on a Client Name, where the client name contains “sql” over a time period of the Last Day once a day at 12am.
The final options to select relate to the fields that are to be compared and returned. If the results from the Smart Group do not align with the expected results, it may be due to the fields selected. For this example, the Children Type is the Backup Client and the Server Name Field is Server (think of this as the backup server) and the final option is the Backup Client Field, which for this example as the Smart Group needs to return the Client Names, the Client Name is selected.
For ease of management, create Smart Groups in a dedicated group/s, rather than saving them within the Servers, Storage, or Switches groups located under Configuration. In Figure 5 a new group called Smart Groups was created under Configuration and the newly created SQL Smart Group is saved within this group. This Smart Group is run daily at 12pm and the results are displayed on the right-side pane in Figure 5.
With the Smart Group created and working based on the filtering criteria, reports can now be run where the scope is the smart group, rather than the static groups of Servers, Storage, or Switches listed under Configuration.
Smart Groups work well when a consistent naming standard for applications and servers has been implemented within the organization. Using Smart Groups avoids creation of static groups as shown in Figure 3 where ‘Prod’ and ‘Dev | Test’ groups were created. Within environments that are very dynamic, Smart Groups greatly reduce the maintenance of Data Protection Advisor where clients need to be manually assigned to groups. And they are extremely useful when reporting of data protection activities is required for application owners.