One of the features most missed by NetWorker users since the introduction of NetWorker Management Console has been the consolidated view of NetWorker activities that had previously been always available.
For the last few releases, this has really only been available via nsrwatch, the utility available in NetWorker on Unix platforms, but sadly missing in NetWorker on Windows systems. If you’re not familiar with nsrwatch (which is possible if you’ve only recently been working with NetWorker, or mainly come from a Windows approach), it gives you a view like the following:
This style of view used to be available in the old “nwadmin” program for both Unix and Windows, and administrators that came from historical releases which supported nwadmin have sorely missed that overview-at-a-glance monitoring as opposed to wading through separate tabs to see glimpses of activities via NMC. It’s sort of like the difference between looking into a building where the entire front wall is made of glass, or looking into a building where there’s 4 windows but to open one you have to close the other three.
With NetWorker 7.6, you can kiss goodbye to that blinkered approach. In all its glory, we have the overview-at-a-glance monitoring back:
Is this compelling enough reason to run out and immediately upgrade to 7.6? Probably not – you need to upgrade based on site requirements, existing patches, known issues and compatibilities, etc. I.e., you need to read the release notes and decide what to do. Preferably, you should have a test environment you can run it up in – or at least develop a back-out plan should the upgrade not work entirely well for you.
Is it a compelling enough reason to at least upgrade your NMC packages to 7.6, or install a dedicated NMC server running 7.6 instead of a pre-7.6 release?
Hell yes.
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