A general-purpose statistical package is priceless, either instead of or
in addition to the TSM-specific reporting tools. SPSS, SAS, or one of
their competitors. This allows you to most easily ask the unanticipated
ad-hoc questions such as, "Do the nodes in that policy domain back up
more data daily, or is it just their large initial full backups?" or "If
I split my server taking all the client nodes like that away to the new
one, what will be left on the old server?" or "How many scratch tapes
will I gain by lowering the reclamation threshold from 50% empty to
48%?" or my favorite one, "Do I have any orphaned tapes that have
nothing on them but which aren't scratch tapes?" The packaged TSM
reporting tools answer most of the common questions, but they cannot
address the issues that are particular to your situation, which usually
arrive as questions from your boss late on a Friday afternoon.

Trends analysis is a particular strength of the general stat packages.
(If you've saved your TSM accounting files from the beginning of time,
you've got great long-term trend data.) You could think of these tools
as "spreadsheets on steroids". The ability to join data from different
tables is extremely powerful. (e.g. the accounting file with the list of
nodes) And that's before you even get into the statistics-geeky stuff
like regression analysis. Anyone who has taken college Statistics 101
will recognize that there is a wealth of _REALLY_ interesting data to
mine from a TSM database and accounting file.

Best way to get data from the TSM database into the stat package:
dsmadmc -comma and issue very simple sql selects. The CDF file output
from dsmadmc -comma is readily digestible by SPSS or SAS, without using
any other APIs.

Roger Deschner      University of Illinois at Chicago     rogerd AT uic DOT edu
========= The only dumb question is the one that goes unasked. =========



On Tue, 27 Dec 2005, Tyree, David wrote:

>            I'm looking for some tools that will allow me to track the
>data coming in from each node and then allow me to see trends.
>
>            Throwing the info into a spreadsheet and then accessing it
>through a web interface would be good.
>
>            I also would like to generate other reports on how things
>are going, check on the general health of my TSM environment and do some
>assorted tweaking if needed.
>
>            I played around with TSMManager several months ago and it
>had some interesting features but I wasn't able to follow through with
>it.
>
>            I'm currently running TSM 5.2 on a Windows box, but I'll be
>going to 5.3 and ISC in the next few weeks. I don't really care for ISC
>but I'll get used to it.
>
>
>
>David Tyree
>Enterprise Backup Administrator
>South Georgia Medical Center
>229.333.1155
>
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