The backup applications usually provide some fundamental reporting on backup operations. You might have a dashboard view and some canned reports that focus on things like backup job status or media, or device error. And if you need to drill down deeper, you can go to things like error logs.
You can also set up alerts so that the administrator knows that there is an error, but often times it really doesn't give you a lot of detail on what caused the error or how to fix it. For enterprise IT organizations that have multiple backup applications, these types of solutions really don't satisfy their needs. They might have to go between one console and another if they're again managing multiple backup apps.
There are a lot of pressures facing IT organizations so the volume of data they have to protect has placed more pressure on the backup window. We've talked about the backup window a lot in this space, so making sure things get done in a timely fashion is really important. Backup infrastructure has become more complex, especially with the mix of disk and tape. Compliance demands have also forced IT into getting better prepared for recovery audits and e-discovery events.
And of course backup teams are really under a lot of pressure to meet stringent service-level agreements and get some operational improvements in their environment. So the built-in reporting and backup solutions can't always address these issues.
Checkout the entire Backup reporting FAQ
