Usage

BGuardian performs a good number of different checks. Ideally, a backup environment would comply with all the rules of those checks and no issue or alert would be detected. However, in many cases, there are some external constrains around resources or about the nature of the data that can make it difficult to comply with some of them.

The main goal of this tool is to help the administrator to keep the system safe and to detect any non-desired behavior. To reach this goal, the tool should generate alerts or issues only when they are actually something that the administrator is going to change or review. This will be only possible if services producing results that will not be actually solved are deactivated, as well as marking those specific alerts that cannot either be solved as something to ignore.

The recommended usage cycle with this tool is:

1. Run it manually one time with default parameters.

2. From the reported information, select the services that are relevant for the given environment.

3. Configure BGuardian with the selection of relevant services.

4. Tune selected services, if needed, to reduce the number of results (adjust dates, factors…).

5. Configure an Admin Job to invoke BGuardian with all the resulting command line parameters needed as discovered in the previous steps.

Once the periodical Admin Job is in place, the user should be notified with the events of every alert creation. Then he should review the situation of a given alert and solve the problem if necessary, or mark the alert to be ignored otherwise.

Go back to the Best Practices article.