A Simple Replay Report

Where I work we use AppAssure’s Replay product to back up some of our Exchange servers.  Because the servers in question are very geographically dispersed we have multiple servers running Replay.  Monitoring and keeping an eye on them to assure backups are happening properly was requiring more time than I wanted to spend because we had different versions of Replay running in the environment. I ended up having to RDP to multiple machines on a regular basis to ensure things were going smoothly.

In poking around the install directory I came across the Replayc.exe command. Replayc is a command line utilty that offers information about the Replay server and a way to manually mount and dismount Recovery Points (RPs). After playing with it a little and being the very lazy person that I am  I decided to write a Powershell script to help give me a high level status overview of my servers.  The script runs on each server at about the same time (relative to me here in Oregon) every day and emails me the output. So instead of having to muck around in the console Ionly have to spend a few seconds each to make sure everything’s running properly.

The script is available here and needs to be renamed appropriately.

When the script runs the email (HTML formatted)  I get is like the one below.  It tells me a number of things:

• The status of the Replay Server (running/not running)
• The name of the server that’s being protected
• How much disk space is available and being used for RPs for that protected server
• The size of the disk where those RPs are being stored
• The # of valid and invalid RPs
• The timespan between first and last valid RP
• Last time an RP occurred.

Example Email:

Starting Script at 04/30/2009 23:20:12

Replay Service is running

Server mailserver.company.com snapshots are being stored on R: and currently using 818.54GB. This is 99.98% of the used space(818.68GB) on the volume which is 1,360.22GB

The drive currently has 39.81% free space (e.g. 541.54GB)

Number of reported Recovery Points is 395 of these 395 are valid, and 0 are invalid (100.00%).
The valid RPs span 23.98 days

The most recent valid RP was taken 1 Minutes ago