Home > Data Protection > Data Protection (general) > Advanced Anomaly Detection with Data Protection Advisor > The elements of running a report
There are three elements required to run a report: the scope, a report template, and time period. Expanding the scope reveals the group structure created by Data Protection Advisor during the installation and any customization of those groups.
Select a group, an item, or multiple combinations thereof against which the report will be run. For example, in the section Monitoring of data protection elements and objects, the grouping of backup elements to be monitored was discussed. Continuing with that example, Figure 7 shows a series of images (from left to right) demonstrating the flexibility of choice with groups to report on the Production, Dev | Test environments or finally, all NetWorker servers.
All discovered backup elements that are contained within the selected parent group or sub-groups are used when a report is generated.
If Smart Groups have been created as described in the section Monitoring of data protection elements and objects, these groups can also be used to run reports. The power of Smart Groups is that they are dynamically populated with protection elements, compared to regular groups that are statically defined.
With the group/s (scope) selected, Data Protection Advisor will present a list of available reports which can be run. Data Protection Advisor filters the list of reports based on the scope of item/s selected. For example, reports only relevant to NetWorker will be displayed if that was selected in the scope. Keep this in mind when generating reports, if the report cannot be found as expected, check the scope selection and adjust as needed.
The last element that is needed is to the define the time period and typically a time period of the last day is selected by default. Under the System Settings of Data Protection Advisor, Time Periods can be created, modified, or deleted as required.
Running a report using the Last Day time period may result in the report providing results based on overlapping backup windows, skewing the results which may not be desirable. The time period of Last Day is run from the time the report is run and covers the previous 24 hours.
If the prescribed backup window which starts last night at 8pm and completes by 6am the following day, create a custom time period to allow reports to be created for last night’s backups. This time period may not be suitable for every report; however, it does allow the report to focus on a prescribed period. Now, regardless of when the report is run, the time period will match as defined. Creating the report is straight forward and an example is provided for reference.
Navigate to the System Settings of Data Protection Advisor, then Time Periods and select the Create Time Period option. Review the start and end time options available in the list and if the desired times are not listed, create a new time by selecting the Edit Times option. From here, create two new time periods starting 8pm last night and for 6am this morning time. Select Create and for last night, set the Day of Month to 1 day ago and then specify the hour to 8pm, as shown in Figure 8.
For the finishing time, select Create and set the hour to 6am, as shown in Figure 9.
With the start and end times defined, the time period can be created and leveraged in creating reports. Simply create a new time period, select the newly created start and end times, provide a description as shown in Figure 10 and the time period is ready for use.