Data Protection Advisor Fundamentals SRG PDF

Welcome to Data Protection Advisor Fundamentals.
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Copyright © 2017 Dell Inc. Data Protection Advisor Fundamentals 1

This course provides an introduction to Data Protection Advisor (DPA). It includes an overview of the Data
Protection Advisor architecture, features, and functionality. It also provides and describes the key use
cases of DPA in an IT environment.

This module focuses on Data Protection Advisor (DPA) solution, its benefits, and use cases.

Data Protection Management offers many challenges in today’s backup and recovery environment. A
Multi-National Telecommunications company faced challenges like unprecedented data growth which
overtaxed the traditional data protection approaches and technologies, leading to increased uncertainty
about protection status. The company uses multiple protection methods like replication and multiple
backup applications which led to data silos. Also, they manage multiple data centers, combined with new
hybrid computing models. Data is often spread across a mix of private and public cloud resources, which
increased the data management complexity. Management of the environment is also complex since it
requires knowledge of backup applications, replication technologies, and the entire supporting
infrastructure. Adding to the complexity, there are varying service-level objectives for backup and
recovery, replication, and virtualization, as well as audit and compliance requirements to consider. They
also shifted from physical to virtual server infrastructure. The processes and technologies that worked well
in a physical environment was not most effective in a virtual one. All of this led to increasing challenges
and uncertainty for protecting business critical data, as well as added cost and complexity.

To solve these challenges the company needed end to end visibility of the entire infrastructure with
analysis, reporting, and alerting capabilities. This solution was provided by Dell EMC’s Data Protection
advisor. DPA is a data protection management software that provides a single view of the entire
infrastructure through data discovery, analysis, and reporting that leverages this data for key backup
management functions. DPA incorporates backup solutions, replication technologies, virtual environments,
tape/VTL storage, SAN and NAS systems, and the business applications protected by the infrastructure. It
consists of a proactive analysis engine, which along with its powerful central datastore drives the
solution’s monitoring, alerting, troubleshooting, optimization, capacity planning, and reporting capabilities.
DPA is architected for future growth, as well as for large, complex environments with more immediate
scalability and recovery requirements. It transforms volumes of disparate data into actionable business
information that allows companies to lower costs through the improved use of their infrastructure, avoiding
unnecessary purchases and reducing manual effort; improves compliance and lowers risk through better
visibility and assurance that critical data is protected; and reduces complexity with a single console to
provide an integrated, automated view.
The company saw payback from using Data Protection Advisor in 12 months or less, with ongoing total
cost of ownership benefits.

Let’s get into the details of how DPA provides these benefits.
DPA enables unified, cross-domain event correlation analysis which provides insight into the entire data
protection path to ensure each component is working correctly. I also provides higher-level decision
support based on defined policies.
Built for cloud infrastructure, Data Protection Advisor offers scalable, centralized multi-tenant data
protection management. It provides significant cost reduction by supporting thousands of tenants on a
single DPA instance without performance degradation.
It also ensures service level attainment by enabling administrators to maintain performance as resource
requirements change.
Data Protection Advisor automates data collection across the data protection infrastructure and analyzes it
for backup failures, performance issues, and replication gaps, presenting it in meaningful formats to
various levels within the business to make informed decisions.
Visibility is crucial to protecting data in dynamic virtualized environments and ensuring compliance with
SLAs. Because virtual machines can be created, moved, or removed on the fly, it is a constant challenge
to understand where a specific system may be located at any particular time, what might by impacting
performance, or if the system is protected. Data Protection Advisor automatically notifies administrators of
unprotected virtual machines by discovering the virtualized environment and reporting on new systems
that may yet to have its applications and data protected.
Here are some statistics of success achieved after the deployment of Data Protection Advisor at the multi-
national company:
• Hardware budget reduction up to 60 percent
• Increased backup success rate
• Zero service level agreement penalties
• Increased audit success rate

Now, let's discuss about DPA integration with Avamar, Data Domain, and VMware.

When DPA is added to a backup environment such as Avamar or Data Domain, it provides a single
consolidated view of multiple decentralized grids, domains or systems, enabling easy access to
information such as historical performance and forecasting future performance and loads.
DPA presents unified information about your entire backup and recovery environment, which enables you
to stay aware of current and potential problems without requiring you to run scripts or analyze large
amounts of data thus providing centralized monitoring capability. Many standard reports are available for
Data Protection Advisor’s performance monitoring on an Avamar grid. Whenever possible, it is preferable
to have Data Protection Advisor’s presence in the environment prior to an Avamar deployment, so that you
can see the performance differences of pre and post Avamar installations.
DPA’s capacity forecasting is a vital feature for a backup-to-disk-based grid such as Avamar. Being able
to project growth and comparing it against established service-level agreements or SLAs, is vital towards
ensuring a healthy virtualized environment. Threshold triggers can be used for both actual and predicted
values, allowing for reactive and proactive management of Avamar.

With Data Domain systems, you have the same capabilities of centralized rollup of multiple systems, as
well as historical and projected consumption and performance reporting. Beyond that, DPA gives more
specific information about the Data Domain environment such as hardware and virtual tape library status.
Having this information as well as other information about the managed environment reduces the time to
resolve complicated cross-domain problems.
Data Protection Advisor works with Data Domain to gather key data and provide insight into performance
problems with the environment. Similarly, Data Protection Advisor provides insight into resource utilization
and capacity planning, which is vital in dynamic virtual environments. Virtual environments leverage
resource pools. When too many requests for the same resources occur, the environment can experience a
performance impact. Data protection Advisor allows the administrator to track utilization over time, as well
as generate predictive trend alerts such as space restrictions.

Virtualization has been great for improving the utilization of hardware assets, and accelerating the creation
and movement of systems. This also creates challenges with managing the dynamic virtual environment
to identify where the system is located, what might be the impact on performance, or if the system is
protected or not. This means systems may be unavailable or the data may not be protected, without being
aware of it.
Data Protection Advisor has extended its core capabilities to the virtual world, improving visibility and
management for VMware environments. DPA provides monitoring, alerting, troubleshooting, optimization,
capacity planning, and reporting for virtualized backup environments.
Specifically, when it comes to DPA’s capabilities for VMware, the product is able to discover the virtualized
environment and report on new systems that may not yet have its applications and data protected. It can
review compliance with SLAs and provide alerting for failures such as resource thresholds. DPA can help
customers to troubleshoot issues of performance across domains like hosts, storage, and networking. It
can also help customers to plan for the future growth of their virtualized environment.

This module covered an overview of DPA features and functions, such as data discovery, data analysis,
and reporting.

This module focuses on DPA architecture and components.

The architecture of DPA consists of the three main components: Application Server, Datastore, and Data
Collection Agent.
The Application Server runs the DPA software in the data protection environment.
The Datastore is a repository to store and manage the data collection for reporting and analysis.
Data Collection Agent is used to collect data from the monitored applications and devices. The data
collected from the monitored application is analyzed and processed by DPA to generate reports. The
number and location of these agents are influenced by the number and type of objects being monitored
and location of these objects. The data collection can be remote as well.
The DPA’s simple split-install deployments are architected for future growth, as well as for large complex
environments with immediate scalability and recovery requirements.

The DPA architecture includes the ability to run multiple DPA Application nodes to form a cluster. From
the DPA perspective, clustering is the ability to run multiple DPA Application nodes that share workload
among themselves and provide administrators the ability to add or remove additional application nodes
on-demand.
Clustering application nodes enables DPA to meet very high throughput requirements and enables easy
scaling of DPA to handle changing workloads and rapidly changing requirements of fast growing
environments. However, since the implementation of clustered application nodes requires additional
hardware and configuration, clustering is not appropriate for all environments.
One of the advantages of clustering, is the ability to perform load balancing across a group of DPA
Application nodes. As a new session is established with DPA, the customer provided load balancing
switch directs traffic to one of the DPA application nodes in the cluster based on a predefined algorithm.
By doing this, the load is spread over the nodes in the cluster while improving the quality of service.

Data collected using a DPA Agent and transmitted to DPA Application nodes is stored by those nodes in
the DPA Datastore. The central datastore scales to support environments with tens to thousands of
clients. This datastore stores data from all of the disparate components, backup applications, and
replication technologies.

DPA includes an embedded datastore, offering performance and support benefits due to closer alignment
of the DPA application with its database. This architecture removes the need for customers to supply and
manage a separate database instance, external to DPA, leading to lower deployment and management
costs.
A migration tool included with DPA enables customers to migrate later DPA (v5.8.x) databases to the new
embedded datastore.
When planning a DPA deployment, you must determine whether the datastore will be protected using a
traditional backup restore or whether datastore replication is required in order to meet Recovery Time
Objectives (RTO) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPO).
Datastore Replication provides automatic, continuous replication allowing for failover from the Master
datastore to the replica, or Slave datastore. In the event of failure of the Master Datastore, the Slave can
be updated to the Master role and the application objects can be configured to use this new Master.
Reconfiguration normally does not take no more than a few minutes to take effect.

When planning a DPA deployment, you must determine whether the datastore will be protected using a
traditional backup restore or whether datastore replication is required in order to meet Recovery Time
Objectives (RTO) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPO).
Datastore Replication provides automatic, continuous replication allowing for failover from the Master
datastore to the replica, or Slave datastore. In the event of failure of the Master Datastore, the Slave can
be updated to the Master role and the application objects can be configured to use this new Master.
Reconfiguration normally does not take no more than a few minutes to take effect.

Data from objects monitored by DPA is always collected through a DPA Agent. By default, the DPA
Application nodes and DPA Datastore Server include the installation of a DPA Agent. It is recommended
that a DPA Agent be installed on the object being monitored directly when supported, such as for
NetWorker and NetBackup, and that Proxy DPA Agents be implemented to handle the data collection load
for monitored objects when an agent cannot be installed, such as for Avamar and Data Domain. You can
configure an Agent to monitor certain types of data remotely. When performing remote monitoring, the
machine on which the Agent is running is called the proxy server. To gather data, the Agent uses a remote
protocol to communicate with the machine from which it is collecting data, then forwards that information
back to the DPA server as shown in the diagram. The remote protocol type depends on the type of data
that is being gathered. Not all information can be gathered remotely from all applications and devices that
are supported by DPA.

The other key component of DPA is the proactive analysis engine, which along with its powerful central
data store drives the solution in monitoring, alerting, troubleshooting, optimization, capacity planning, and
reporting capabilities. The proactive analysis engine constantly monitors incoming data against a variety of
rules, looking for failures, threshold exceptions, and developing conditions. The analysis engine can look
for a failure on a critical host, repeated failures, growth of a backup that will exceed the backup window,
missed SLAs, and resource utilization thresholds.

The operation of Analysis Engine is based on analysis policies. An analysis policy is a collection of one or
more rules that is assigned to an object or group. Rules contain the logic for when to issue an alert. A
standard rule-set can be used or customized to suit your requirements, and can monitor any of the
resources or policies that DPA supports.
Event-based rules trigger an alert in response to data that is streaming into the DPA server. Schedule-
based rules periodically compare data in the DPA datastore against rules to detect a match. Alerts can
contain dynamic textual information and might include populated links to reports. Only analysis policies
can generate alerts.
Now, let us look at the system requirements of DPA.

The DPA Server requirements are listed on the slide.
The EMC Data Protection Advisor Software Compatibility Guide provides a comprehensive listing of
system requirements.

DPA Agent Requirements are listed on the slide. The DPA Data Collection Agent runs on Windows,
Solaris, Linux, AIX, and HP-UX.
The EMC Data Protection Advisor Software Compatibility Guide provides a comprehensive listing of
system requirements.

This module covered an overview of DPA architecture. It also covered the functionality of the components.

This module focuses on the DPA GUI management, available licensing options, and REST API.

The Administrator account is the only account active after DPA installation. The user sets the
Administrator account password during the DPA installation process. The Administrator must set
passwords for the other default user accounts before they can be used to access DPA. If the Administrator
does not set passwords for the other user accounts, they will remain in a disabled state. Administrators
have complete and unrestricted access to the application.
Application owners only have the ability to modify host configurations and run, print, email, and save
reports.
Engineers have the ability to change everything except security settings.
Users in the system only have the ability to run, print, and save reports. User account passwords are
stored in the DPA Datastore only when the internal authentication method is configured.

Data Protection Advisor allows the integration of an Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP)server
in the environment.
If LDAP authentication is used, when a user logs in to Data Protection Advisor (DPA) the DPA Server
service communicates with the LDAP server, verifies that the user exists, and authenticates the password
against that user stored in LDAP. User passwords do not need to be stored in the DPA database.
DPA supports Microsoft Active Directory and OpenLDAP as LDAP servers. If you have installed DPA on a
UNIX environment and are authenticating to a Microsoft Active Directory LDAP server, you cannot
connect to the Windows machine using SSL.

DPA supports two types of LDAP binding methods: simple bind and anonymous bind.
To configure anonymous bind, ensure that the anonymous bind checkbox is checked in the Manage
External Authentication tab.

System in the Admin tab allows access to the management features of DPA.
Show Setup Guide presents the minimal steps to take when setting up the system for the first time. The
Setup Guide starts automatically at Startup. This option can be disabled.
Run Discovery Wizard defines objects to be monitored. Objects discovered include data protection hosts,
devices, and applications. Expanding each Object Type will display the specific objects that can be
discovered.
Configure Report Settings is used for deduplication, SLA reporting, demo time, large report, and scaling.
Configure System Settings allows the admin to modify default system settings such as DPA agents,
Server, Replication Analysis, and Agentless Discovery.

Manage Credentials allows the admin to access credentials used by Discovery Wizard and Data
Collection Requests. Credentials are used by the data collection agent to connect to hosts, applications,
and devices for data collection. Once a credential is created, it can be assigned when configuring data
collection for an object using the Discovery Wizard or from Inventory.
Manage Custom Resolutions allows you to create up to five custom backup and restore resolution fields
that allow you to add a resolution to a failed job, and then at a later date view the resolution to see what
caused the failure.
For example, you can create a field as a reference to an external ticketing system that includes further
resolution information for failed backups. Administrators can control the format of a custom field and make
the field mandatory or optional.
Manage Custom Attributes is used to create, edit, and delete custom attributes that you can assign to
objects. Object attributes extend the information that DPA holds about an object. After a custom attribute
is created, the attribute can be enabled for any valid objects as per custom attribute settings and a value
can be assigned.

Manage Data Collection Defaults is used to view and edit data collection requests. A DPA request
contains data on how and when to gather data from an object. Data collection defaults are the template
used by the Discovery Wizard to assign requests to objects.
Manage licenses is used to add, view, and delete licenses. DPA is bundled with a 60-day evaluation
license. The evaluation license is created from the time of DPA installation, is valid for up to 60 days, and
allows access to all features. If you import a license during the 60-day evaluation license period, the
evaluation license is removed and you have access to DPA features according to license you imported.
Manage Schedules is used to define when to run a scheduled report or generate a dashboard viewlet, or
to define the backup window specified in the Protection Policy. Several predefined schedules are installed
with Data Protection Advisor and you may create custom schedules.
Manage Time Periods is used to create, edit, and delete predefined system time periods. When you run a
report or create a scheduled report, you must decide the period of time over which the report is run.

DPA Command Line can be used for Installing and Uninstalling DPA on Unix, Linux, or Windows.
Command line can be used for operations like Application, Datastore, Service, and Loading historical
backup data. A Dell EMC Technical Support Engineer may ask you to source the DPA config file before
running any agent binaries (including DPA Agent request in debug mode and backup job), and any
command line operations on UNIX.

A Data Protection Advisor for Backup license provides the ability to monitor all components of the backup
infrastructure, providing a complete picture of the backup environment. Data Protection Advisor licenses for
backup environments comes in one of two forms, depending on the backup application being monitored:
• Licensed by number of backup clients (all backup applications other than EMC Avamar and
NetWorker)
• Licensed by backup capacity (EMC Avamar and NetWorker only)
Data Protection Advisor for VMware environments is licensed by VMware ESX server. However, it is
intended to be sold as a complement to Data Protection Advisor backup environments. When licensed in
VMware environments, Data Protection Advisor identifies which virtual machines within the ESX server
are being backed up and which are not, as well as bottlenecks in the physical infrastructure.
Additionally, the details captured by Data Protection Advisor enables activities such as performance tuning
of ESX servers and adjusting backup schedules to reduce impact on production servers.

The Enterprise Applications license provides reporting on Oracle RMAN, MS SQL, and SAP HANA. This
functionality is licensed based on front end protected capacity.
In DPA 6.1 and higher, no license is required for VNX file, Celerra, and CLARiiON functionality. DPA will
require licenses for Symmetrix, VNX block, and any other block storage array. Licensing is based on the
number of block storage arrays in the environment on both source and target sites.

Representational State Transfer (REST)is a simple stateless architecture that generally runs over HTTP.
The REST style emphasizes that interactions between clients and services are enhanced by having a
limited number of operations.
Flexibility is provided by assigning resources their own URIs (unique universal resource indicators).
Because the GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE operations have a specific meaning, REST avoids
ambiguity.

RESTful web services offer several advantages, including:
• Support for different HTTP methods to perform different actions
• Detailed response codes and header information
• Pagination support for large data sets
• Streaming data on GET requests
The DPA REST API is a RESTful interface that allows programmers to access information that has been
collected, stored, and managed by DPA. By using the REST API to retrieve data discovered and
calculated by DPA, application developers can build their own applications and mashups that leverage this
information.
The REST API provides a more robust and expansive API with increased functionality that allows
programmers to extract DPA data via any tool or programming language that supports RESTful API calls.
Using REST API, you can Retrieve an “all jobs” report for last month from a host by defining the data
required in a DPA report and extracting the report data via a REST API call.
For more detailed information, download the Dell EMC Data Protection Advisor Programmers' Guide to
Using DPA REST API from support.emc.com.

This module covered DPA system management features, its command line operations, licensing options
and REST API.

This module focuses on Dashboard overview. It also explains the key features of DPA Advisor and its use
cases in an IT environments. Finally, it covers DPA features and capabilities.

This lesson covers and overview of dashboard and dashboard template. It also covered how to customize
dashboard.

The Dashboard area presents a visual representation of the enterprise-wide summary of the backup and
replication environment. It provides information at-a-glance enabling you to make quick decisions. A
Dashboard consists of multiple small windows called as “viewlets”. Viewlets are configurable building
blocks that make up the contents of a dashboard. The Dashboard has three sections which include
Summary, Replication, and Backup aligned to the different IT roles. The Replication section is targeted for
storage administrators, the backup section for backup administrators, and the summary section is for IT
Managers. Additional dashboard tabs can be created and customized with any DPA report.

DPA includes several predefined system templates and viewlets that can be customized to appear on
dashboard. In order to view the available System Dashboard Templates you need to:
1. Click the + icon near the system dashboards.
2. Select Create New Dashboard.
3. Enter a the Dashboard Name and click Select Dashboard Template.
4. From the Select Dashboard Template window select System Dashboard Template and you can view
the list of all the system templates that are available.

You can also customize dashboards with buttons, labels, images, reports, and viewlets. In order to do that:
1. Open a created template and click Edit Dashboard and select Dashboard Format.
2. Select one of the viewlet.
3. On the right side you will get options to customize the viewlet as per your requirement.

This lesson covers various features of DPA Advisor which include analysis engine, alert management, and
replication analysis.

The Advisor area tightly integrates with DPA's policy-driven analysis engine. It provides real-time analytics
and drives services offered by DPA. It evaluates all events that occur in the environment, and generates
immediate and automated notification if it finds any violations in the policies.
It also provides end-to-end visibility and unified cross-domain analysis of data, which helps in establishing
an efficient Decision Support System(DSS).
Since analysis engine looks across the entire data protection environment, it can help to identify trends
and enable administrators to plan for future.

An Analysis Policy is a collection of one or more rules that are primarily used for triggering alerts. DPA
compares collected data to the conditions in the analysis policies to trigger the alerts if the condition fails.
An Analysis policy can be applied at group level or at object level. All objects, that do not already have an
assigned policy, inherit any policy associated with its group. Specifying a policy on an object within a
group will override the setting of the group for that object.
Note: Best practice is to apply policies to the highest level group.

A rule in an Analysis policy contains a set of logics that define when to issue an alert. The analysis engine
compares monitored data to the conditions in a rule, and triggers alerts when a rule is matched. Rule are
of two types:
• Event-based rule: It trigger an alert in response to data that is streaming into the DPA.
• Schedule-based: Periodically compares the collected data against rules to detect a match.
Alerts can contain dynamic textual information and might include populated links to reports.

Alerts tab in the Advisor window shows problems and its possible causes. Alerts identify the problems
within the environment and recommend appropriate solutions, enabling you to resolve problems faster,
thereby reducing the impact on business. A new alert is raised when the threshold defined in the policy is
exceeded. The alerts are the outcome of the Analysis Engine, which is driven by Policies. The alerts are
not dependent on a particular group. The system shows all alerts together, regardless of which groups
they affect.

When you select an alert in the Alerts section, the bottom pane displays the alert properties and details on
the associated policies and groups, and related reports.
Properties includes a description of what caused the alert, a possible resolution, and any notes associated
with the alert. The description and resolution are part of the rule that generated the alert.
Policy displays the policy details that includes the rule which generated the alert.
Groups displays the groups in the inventory that are affected by the alert.

Once you go through the details of the generated alert, you can manage it in four ways:
• You Acknowledge new alerts that are generated and change its status to open.
• Once the alert is resolved you can close it, which indicates that the issue that generated the alert is
resolved.
• Add notes to an alert for any future references.
• Edit or change the policy associated with an alert to suit the requirement. When you select Edit Policy
option it opens the policy with the rule that generated the alert.
Note: Freeze auto refresh to ensure that the alert that you are currently addressing is not moved down the
list of alerts and out of view.

The Replication Analysis section shows the alerts and provides the graphical representation of your
replication environment.
Through the Replication Analysis section, a storage administrator can analyze and view the status of
replication operations, recoverability, and the storage mapping for objects and individual arrays, file
systems, and applications.
The Replication Analysis section consists of two panels.
• The Scope or navigation tree
• The Replication Gaps which are the errors.
The Scope lists the servers, applications, and storage devices that are configured in DPA.
The Replication Gaps panel displays all the replication errors and detailed information in the columns.
Now, let’s look at the scenario in the next slide to understand how DPA plays a vital role in an IT
environment.

An organization using Data Domain system for storing the backup data, wants to extend their storage
capacity once the 80% of current Storage space is consumed. Due to variation in the size of incoming
application data they cannot predict the actual time when system would reach the threshold. So the
organization is looking for a product which can help them resolve this.
Solution: Install DPA client on the Data Domain system and with the help of DPA’s analysis engine a
report can be generated predicting the tentative dates for the system to reach the threshold and a policy
can be created to generate an alert once the system reaches the threshold.

This lesson covers the features of DPA Reporting and focuses on different categories and types of DPA
reporting. It also covers on federated reporting feature of DPA.

DPA offers a very robust reporting functionality with dedicated sections for various features.
The reports generated by DPA retrieves information about the environment and helps you to review and
analyze the activities in the environment. Using these reports, you can identify outages in the environment,
diagnose problems, plan to mitigate the risks, and forecast future trends. The generated reports can be
customized to display in dashboard to ease the data management process.
Through the Reports area, you can create and run various types of reports or customize the reports to
meet the enterprise requirements.

Reporting are of two types in DPA. On-demand and Scheduled reporting.
On-demand reports can be run at any time as per the users requirement. They are ad hoc reports and you
can run with the currently available data and view immediately.
The on-demand reports are very useful in daily operations where you can run any report at any time, from
the various types of reports that DPA offers. By running an on-demand report, you can:
• Generate a point-in-time report.
• Run from several predefined or scheduled reports.
A scheduled report is a report that the DPA Server runs at a scheduled time and publishes the results in
one or more formats. The Scheduled Run Reports is available only if Manage scheduled reports
privilege is assigned to the user’s role. By scheduling a report, you can:
• Automate the generation of report and schedule the report generation frequency.
• Configure the email addresses of users to whom the report must be sent.
• Publish to SharePoint server.

Data Protection Advisor includes flexible reporting that allows the presentation of data in many ways,
providing immediate value and saving hours of manual efforts. Here are Data Protection Advisor report
areas:
• Service level agreement reporting provides the overall SLA statistics in the report.
• Deduplication ratio reports can be generated for EMC Data Domain, Avamar, and NetWorker.
• Key Performance Indicator report on backups and restores to see the progress towards achieving
the business objective.
• Capacity planning reports helps to forecast capacity requirements and enabling efficient budget
planning to avoid loss.
• Performance, resource utilization, and scheduling to optimize the resources.
• Chargeback report helps to perform a financial cost analysis for the backups and restores.
• Configuration, licensing, and media management reports, for managing the overall system
operations.

DPA 6.3 supports Federated Reporting. Federated Reporting is a useful feature, if you have a large
environment with multiple DPA servers. If these multiple DPA servers, in turn, are categorized into
different geographies or different customer groups, you may want to run one report across all the DPA
servers.
Federated Reporting merges all of the DPA servers into one supertree structure on a DPA server that you
have designated as the Federated DPA server from which to run the Federated report. Federated
Reporting allows you to run a report on the Federated DPA server and utilize the new Federated data
source across the super tree structure. Federated DPA server sends the run report request to the
individual Regional DPA servers. The results from each of the Regional DPA servers are sent back to the
Federated DPA server as a single report from the output of the Federated data source.

This module covered an overview of DPA features, which includes DPA Advisor’s features and functions,
DPA analysis engine, analysis policy, policy rules and alerts, replication analysis feature, DPA dashboard
options, and use of Federated reporting in a large environment with multiple DPA servers.

This course covered an introduction to Data Protection Advisor (DPA). It also covered an overview of the
DPA architecture, features, and functionality.


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Welcome to Data Protection Advisor Fundamentals.

Revision Date: April 2017

Revision Number: MR-1WN-EBAFUN.6.3

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Now, let us look at the system requirements of DPA.

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Engineers have the ability to change everything except security settings.

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• Support for different HTTP methods to perform different actions

• Detailed response codes and header information

• Pagination support for large data sets

• Streaming data on GET requests

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1. Click the + icon near the system dashboards.

2. Select Create New Dashboard.

3. Enter a the Dashboard Name and click Select Dashboard Template.

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2. Select one of the viewlet.

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Note: Best practice is to apply policies to the highest level group.

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