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  1. Home
  2. NetBackup™ for VMware Administrator's Guide
  3. Back up virtual machines
  4. Using the Activity Monitor to monitor virtual machine backups
NetBackup™ for VMware Administrator's Guide

Using the Activity Monitor to monitor virtual machine backups

You can use the NetBackup Activity Monitor to keep track of the VMware virtual machines that a policy backs up.

To monitor virtual machine backups

  1. Click Activity Monitor in the left pane of the Administration Console.
  2. Note each job as it appears by row.

    If the policy selects virtual machines automatically (based on a query), the backup consists of three generations of jobs:

    • The first job discovers the virtual machines. This job is labeled Backup. (This job is unique to policies that use a query to select virtual machines.)

    • The discovery (Backup) job starts a child job to take a VMware snapshot of the virtual machine. A snapshot job is started for each virtual machine. Each of these jobs is labeled Snapshot.

    • Each snapshot job starts a child job to back up the virtual machine. A backup job is started for each virtual machine. Each of these jobs is labeled Backup.

      The job flow is as follows:

      discovery job --> snapshot job --> backup job
  3. To trace the discovery job to the virtual machine backup jobs, note the Job ID and the Parent Job ID columns.

    In this example, the discovery job is 119. Job 119 started job 120 (Snapshot). Job 120 started job 121 (Backup).

  4. Right-click on the job row and click Details.

    On the Job Details screen, click the Detailed Status tab for more information on the job.

  5. If a column is not displayed in the Activity Monitor, or to re-arrange the columns, do the following:

    • Right-click anywhere in the Jobs pane and click Columns > Layout.

    • Click the row for the heading that you want to display, hide, or re-arrange (such as Parent Job ID).

    • Use Move Up, Move Down, Show, and Hide as needed.

    • Click OK. The columns should now be visible in the Activity Monitor.

See Limit jobs per policy on the Attributes tab (for VMware).

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