nbutop.pl - An active backup job monitoring utility for NetBackup
nbutop.pl [-v] [-i] [-r|-l] [-s <interval>] [-p <limit>] [-M <master>]
In the vein of top this utility presents a dynamically refreshing list of running NetBackup jobs. It adapts (somewhat) to your display size but a minimum of 100 columns is definitely required.
By combining information from bpdbjobs and vmoprcmd, the exact tape drive each job is using can be inferred making many trouble-shooting tasks that much easier. (This obviously does not apply when replaying prior monitoring sessions using the -r option.)
After a looooong initial delay during which NetBackup's bpdbjobs utility gathers all information it has on all its jobs and sends it across to nbutop.pl the screen will show the running jobs as well as some statistics on queued jobs. Additionally you will see a reference to the number of drives nbutop.pl thinks are available for use. Subsequent refreshes do not take nearly as long to calculate since bpdbjobs' undocumented "refresh" command is used to gather the raw data for them.
The throughput calculation is simply a matter of adding up all the speeds from all the running streams. By default nbutop.pl will start out displaying cumulative speeds meaning it simply divides a job's total amount of data written by the time spent writing that data. Switching to instantaneous throughput causes it to examine the amount data written most recently instead thus giving a measurement more indicative of the rate at which the job is writing right now. (See the -i option below.)
Only media servers actually write data to tape. Some of that data is available local to that media server, some (most?) of it arrives via one or more network connections. Nbutop.pl separately adds up the throughout on only those jobs whose data arrives via a network connection to quickly give you a sense of the load on the network.
There are a few single character commands you may now issue to control nbutop.pl's run-time behavior, the most important of which are 'q' to quit out of nbutop.pl and '?' for a splash screen describing all the other commands.
Verbose output only adds the job's schedule to the output display.
Start out listing all job throughput information using a trailing "instantaneous" calculation rather than the default cumulative one. This can be changed while nbutop.pl is running. Instantaneous throughput number can fluctuate wildly but are helpful when you suspect a job is slowly slowing down.
This option enables the logging of the raw job data transmitted from the NetBackup master being monitored to a file in the user's home directory called ".alljobs.allcolumns". This can then be used with the -r option to replay the session.
Upon replaying a previously loggged series of job reports from a master server, nbutop.pl is no longer able to correlate the mounting of volumes to the current state of the tape drives and thus is not able to show which drives are (were?) being used.
Winkeler, Paul pwinkeler@pbnj-solutions.com
Copyright (C) 2002 Paul Winkeler
To install NBU, copy and paste the appropriate command in to your terminal.
cpanm
cpanm NBU
CPAN shell
perl -MCPAN -e shell install NBU
For more information on module installation, please visit the detailed CPAN module installation guide.