Discovery Policies Overview
The Discovery module, specific to Symantec NetBackup, uses Discovery policies to illuminate risk and exposure within the corporate IT backup and recovery environment. The Discovery module is a separately licensed feature. See
About Discovery Types and
Activate a Discovery License.
Discovery policies provide answers to the following questions:
• Where is my data protected? (for example, disk-to-disk, disk-to-tape, or disk-to-disk-to-tape)
• What is the extent and coverage of my data protection?
• Are all my clients and applications protected?
• Is every data set on every client and every application protected?
Discovery finds hosts on a corporate network and compares those hosts with the policies of the underlying backup and recovery software. Discovery performs the following steps:
1. Identifies orphan clients that are not being protected.
2. Probes and determines the file systems or drives of the hosts.
3. Compares and contrasts the file systems to the equivalent policies within the underlying backup and recovery software.
Use Discovery policies if:
• Your IT infrastructure, applications, and servers are rapidly changing.
• Your backup solution cannot detect your backup servers and cannot provide information about successful or unsuccessful backups.
About Discovery Types
Three different Discovery types can be configured to collect additional NetBackup data. To configure and manage Discovery, see
Create and Edit Discovery Policies.
Client Drive Discovery
• This feature requires a Discovery license and SNMP. This Discovery process seeks out hosts and devices in your environment. The process identifies all hosts in your environment, in particular those that are not currently stored in the reporting database and are therefore potentially not being backed up. This probe uses SNMP to probe the IP address range for drive utilization; therefore, SNMP must be enabled.
Media Server Disk Discovery
• This Discovery process probes all the media servers associated with the management server to gather disk-based information such as capacity and free space on the media server file systems. This information is then displayed in the Disk Usage and Performance report. If the Media Server Disk Discovery process is not enabled, disk-based information will show as Unknown in reports. If you have several master servers in your environment, and they have media servers and disk storage units attached to them, you must enable the Media Server Disk Discovery module on each of the master servers.
Backup Policy Coverage
• This feature requires a Discovery license and SNMP. This Discovery process, probes all the NetBackup clients known to the NetBackup database that are associated with the management server. It queries NetBackup to discover if there are backup policies that cover the client. A client is determined to be associated with the NetBackup management server if it belongs to a policy associated with the management server. This probe uses SNMP to probe for drive utilization; therefore, SNMP must be enabled.