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Commcell License Capacity Report

  • 26 January 2021
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Userlevel 2
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Hello,

 

I figured I would drop this question here to see if anyone can answer before I open up a full ticket for this.  I am looking for some type of report that will show what is using up our Capacity.  Recently we were nearly at 100% capacity and suddenly it dropped down to 84%.  We have been unable to find any reason for this.  So was wondering if anyone knew of a report that we can run comparisons of the capacity by days to try and find out what happened.  Thank you for any help you can give.

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Best answer by Henke 28 January 2021, 14:41

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Userlevel 7
Badge +23

Heath, welcome!

Definitely a good place for this question!

Before I dive into an answer, are you referring to Storage Capacity (i.e. how much disk space backups are using) or License Capacity (i.e. you are licensed for 100 TB and the report says you are over)?

Assuming the former, I would think you likely had a large Deduplication Store that macro pruned, meaning all of the jobs in a sealed store aged off at the same time so the entire thing was physically deleted.

For the latter, you can run a License Summary Report to show which Fulls per active subclient are ‘counting’ towards your capacity usage.  If it drops a LARGE amount, the most likely culprits are:

  • Disabled subclients no longer counting
  • Removed content from subclients (s the next full was much smaller)
  • Problematic Full backups that ran properly the next Full (with no restarts, etc.)

Let me know your specific need and I can respond with a lot more information and helpful tips!

Userlevel 2
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Thanks for writing back Mike, I should have given more definition that's my mistake.  I am looking under “Licensing and Registration”  The Capacity Tab.  At first I thought this happened because we had a synthetic full fail over a weekend.  We worked through that issue, ran a normal full before the weekend and then the weekend ran its normal scheduled synthetic and we had no change to the capacity, so I think that rules that out.  Is there a way to check what might have been pruned from the Deduplication Store?  We also had maintenance done on our SAN and updated all the OS’s, so possibly that caused an issue as well, but not sure how I would be able to trace that.  I would love to just say oh great we have more room, I just fear we lost something that maybe we need for some reason or another.  Thanks again for the help.

Userlevel 7
Badge +23

Better safe than sorry!

So if you’re referring to Licensing Capacity, then you can ignore what I mentioned about a pruned dedupe store (that was for only storage capacity freeing up).

Capacity License Agreement usage is calculated by looking at the Application Size of the most recent full per active subclient and comparing that total to your licensed amount. For that reason, deleting jobs generally will have no effect on CLA usage since there is almost always a 'most recent full', even if you delete the current full.

To start, run the License Summary Report and enable Include Capacity Details.  This will give you a full breakdown of each License Capacity type you have and what is being utilized.

In the report, you will see a full list of every client that is ‘counting’ and how much they are utilizing from your capacity total.

  • Are any clients missing?  If so, verify that the missing subclients are enabled
  • Any backup sizes look smaller than expected? If so, go check the backup history for those subclients and see if a) the previous Full backup was larger, and investigate the smaller backup to find out why.

At the heart, the way Capacity License usage goes down is really twofold: Less clients are enabled, or the enabled subclients are now smaller (or a combination of both).  Just a matter of reviewing the report details to see what looks off.

Userlevel 2
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Sorry took so long to write back, but I gave that a shot and I think that will work, however is there a way to run that backdated?  It would be nice to have them both make it much easier to see the difference.  I ran the Commcell Console version.  I will try the Web version maybe that one has the ability to backdate.

Userlevel 4
Badge +13

Just a suggestion.

Run a Job summary report and choose only “Full” backups. Run it for the time period so you can compare 2 or 3 backup jobs for any differences on application size.

If its a large number of clients it may not be a viable solution though.

 

Userlevel 7
Badge +23

Sorry took so long to write back, but I gave that a shot and I think that will work, however is there a way to run that backdated?  It would be nice to have them both make it much easier to see the difference.  I ran the Commcell Console version.  I will try the Web version maybe that one has the ability to backdate.

No apology needed!

The short answer is: No, because the other jobs might be pruned off and gone.

The longer answer is exactly what @Henke said, if you suspect a few subclients, run a Job Summary report for just fulls and look at the size discrepancy (for jobs for the same subclient).

What you want to look out for is clients that dropped in size by a large amount.  It could just be that a drive was added, or content to a subclient temporarily.  However, it could be a sign that you’re not backing up the expected data 100% and would need more investigation (also through the Job summary report).

Feel free to mark one of the helpful replies as Best answer if you feel you have your answers :nerd:

Userlevel 2
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All the answers were great in the sense I learned stuff I didn’t know before.  I tried running the Summary reports and in the process of going through them now.  And because of that I noticed some old backups that we no longer backup but it still listed in that number so I am looking into fixing that but that isn’t what was removed so I will keep looking.  Thank you all for the help.

Userlevel 7
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Glad your first Community post was so helpful!!

Userlevel 3
Badge +3

Plenty of great advice here already but just wanted to drop this useful CV Store report here for comparing subclient size changes within a definable time range. Another useful tool to include when searching for ‘culprits’.

 https://cloud.commvault.com/webconsole/softwarestore/#!/135/665/11301 

Userlevel 2
Badge +6

 

We had a similar problem, except that our capacity suddenly from 60% exceeded over 100%.

Then we went by logic to see what the new big backup was, so we found that we mistakenly included disks on the file server that are already backing up in the another plan, so we had duplicate files. Certainly a report of recent backup jobs can help see what and who had.

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