How To Prevent Avamar’s “Activities – DPN Summary” Report From Crash

Okay guys I have another interesting one for you. I had been struggling for a few years now in my attempts to run an Activities – DPN Summary report on my Avamar. When I attempted this report it would freeze the Avamar ( Java ) console, cause CPU spikes on my local system, and I would have to kill the task in order to free my system from its icy grasp. Keep in mind that I am referring only to the Java based console freezing up that is installed on my local system (PC) and not the Avamar itself.

After much white paper reading I finally have resolve the issue and with this tutorial I hope to do the same for you. First, if you have not ever ran a report they can be found in the Avamar console in the Tools\Manage Reports…

Here you will see all the many different types or reports Avamar can run for you to make your life easier. Based on if it doesn’t lock up your system.

All you need to do is select the report and click “Run” at the top. Some reports like the DPN Summary will ask for you to specify a date range. The larger the date range the larger the data file.

The Solution

So in order to get around the Avamar console crash we need to modify a batch file on our local system. The file named mcgui.bat is located under “C:\Program Files (x86)\avs\administrator\ Your Version Number Here \bin\mcgui.bat”

First thing we need to do is change the permissions on this file or we will not be allowed to save and/or replace this file after making our edits. So lets right click the file and go to properties. Then select Users and click Edit…

Now add a check by clicking on the Allow box next to the Full control option and then click OK.

You will see everything is checked and click OK again.

Now we right click the file again, but this time we select Edit.

Here we will see a lot of text, but the part we care about is near the end with a -Xmx512m. This is how much memory the console is allowed to use on your local system. As you can see it is set to only 512 megabytes or half a Gig and any modern system can spare a little more.

Here we will double the amount to a Gig or 1024 so we just need to edit the number portion only from 512 to 1024.

Now save the the file with our changes and we are done, it was literally that easy. You can now go back and run your DPN Summary report and it will work almost instantly.

Resolution

Avamar enhancement Bug 305221 has been filed to improve GUI performance in future releases of Avamar

Workaround #2
If the report continues to crash the Avamar Administrator client consider splitting the report into multiple, smaller ranges of time and run each one in turn. The results of those multiple reports can be manually combined into a single spreadsheet or results file.

Workaround #3
Run the report directly from the utility node command line.  The following string will take the FROM and TO dates (format = YYYY-MM-DD-) and produce output in a file called dpn_summary.csv 

cat /usr/local/avamar/lib/sql/rptActDPNSummary.sql |sed s/FROM_TIMESTAMP_TOKEN/`date -d 2022-01-07 +%s`/ | sed s/TO_TIMESTAMP_TOKEN/`date -d 2022-02-07 +%s`/ |psql -p 5555 mcdb > dpn_summary.csv

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