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Cragdoo
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CBT Data is Invalid - Shouldn't this be an Error/Warning?

Post by Cragdoo »

While investigating a replication job taking longer than expected I cam across this in the job statistics

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18/12/2017 20:08:01 :: CBT data is invalid, failing over to legacy incremental backup. No action is required, next job run should start using CBT again. If CBT data remains invalid, follow KB1113 to perform CBT reset. Usual cause is power loss.
I would have thought this would flag up as a warning rather than green tick? Given it will signficantly increase the duration of you backups, possibly breaching any backup windows you may have set.
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Re: CBT Data is Invalid - Shouldn't this be an Error/Warning

Post by Gostev »

Our paradigm for events is a follows:

Success/Info event > Backup is created, and no action is required from end user.
Warning event > Backup is created, but action is required from end user.
Error event > Backup creation fails.

So this case is clearly Success/Info event one, no doubt.

But even when in doubt, we always give preference to Success over Warning. This is after dozens of situations in the past 10 years where a warning in some newly added functionality would instantly result in a multi-page topic of unhappy customers who don't like to receive this new warnings, forcing us to revert one to Info event in the immediate update. For what it's worth, everyone wants to get nothing but green emails unless something happens when they really need to act.
tsightler
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Re: CBT Data is Invalid - Shouldn't this be an Error/Warning

Post by tsightler » 1 person likes this post

This is a tough one because this problem is usually transient and self-corrects on the next run, however, if it fails for multiple runs, action will almost certainly be required from the end user to correct the issue. I just had this exact situation come up twice in the last week, both customers were seeing very long backup times, running into their production day and causing issues (in one case aborting due to backup window), but there's "nothing wrong" according to Veeam. Investigating turned up mulitple VMs with the invalid CBT issue every night but the customer scanned right over the message in the event log because it was green. Resetting CBT for the impacted VMs corrected the issue after one additional run.

It would be really nice if we could potentially turn this into a warning only in cases where the previous sessions had also experienced the failure. Perhaps another option would be to use a blue "info" status for such a message (I know, we don't really have that status today, but I could see it's use in other cases as well), something that doesn't change the overall status of the job/task, but would stand out when scanning the task log. Just throwing out some ideas, I certainly understand our current reasoning, but it's somewhat misleading when this failure happens to be persistent rather than transient.
Cragdoo
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Re: CBT Data is Invalid - Shouldn't this be an Error/Warning

Post by Cragdoo »

I'm with Tom on this one, having just been in an almost identical situation. I'll add a +1 for the info/blue icon, for the exact same reasons as Tom.
everyone wants to get nothing but green emails unless something happens when they really need to act.
I have to disagree, I'd rather have a warning, check it out for it be ok, that get a green email, assume it was ok and find out it wasn't ok.
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Re: CBT Data is Invalid - Shouldn't this be an Error/Warning

Post by nitramd »

I concur also with Tom for these situations - I've seen several over the past few months.

+1 for the blue icon/info status.
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Re: CBT Data is Invalid - Shouldn't this be an Error/Warning

Post by MSweetman »

We are also seeing this causing issues due to extended backup times.

Please add one more request for a Blue icon/info status.

Thank you.
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Re: CBT Data is Invalid - Shouldn't this be an Error/Warning

Post by csydas »

Not a bad idea, but at least in the case of older Hyper-V Backups it wouldn't be useful with the proprietary CBT tech, right? Cause from the Hyper V CBT article, it's expected that after resetting CBT that you'd need multiple runs before the CBT is properly built.

Honestly, the more I think about it the more it seems that HyperV is just the wrench for this - there are currently a lot of situations where it's normal and expected for Hyper V to not get any CBT (SMB3 shares on Nutanix for example...though I guess that goes away in v10, or mixed host levels). Maybe there's a way to just apply it to VMware backups?
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Re: CBT Data is Invalid - Shouldn't this be an Error/Warning

Post by MSweetman » 1 person likes this post

Hi Product Mgt.
Yet another reason to have a warning. A customer's ESX 6.0 cluster was not patched for a CBT issue which caused a number of VM backups to be corrupt. (see https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2116127 ... ateRoute=1)
Even though Daily SureBackups run which appeared to be successful, there was still an issue.

Thank you.... Mark
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Re: CBT Data is Invalid - Shouldn't this be an Error/Warning?

Post by Wadih »

Hi,

When a backup takes 9 hours instead of 20 minutes, I would definitely put this as a warning to notify us to take a look at what's happening.

Nothing normal or OK about that a backup taking 9 hours instead of 20 minutes. Definitely it's something to signal to a sysadmin to look into.

That's the type of error I would definitely welcome in my inbox alerts to assist in further optimizing my environment.
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Re: CBT Data is Invalid - Shouldn't this be an Error/Warning?

Post by veremin »

Do you have Veeam ONE deployed? If so, you can set a corresponding alert (job duration) and stay notified in similar cases. Thanks!
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