Storage

Defender DataProtect Blog Post

As a fairly new customer of IBM's innovative Defender DataProtect, my team and I have been diving headfirst into its capabilities while hunting for documentation and some step-by-step guides to tackle its configurations and management. Like many seasoned administrators, we often rely on a mix of instinct, experience, and trial-and-error to plow through installations. But let’s face it—sometimes, a nice How-To is exactly what you need to hit the ground running and get things working right the first time.

In this blog, I’ve put together a quick and easy How-To for getting the Eagle Agent up and running in just a few minutes. 

Now, to set your expectations: at of the time of writing this blog, the Eagle Agent’s functionalities within Defender DataProtect are fairly basic. It handles essential tasks like reporting its health, monitoring storage usage, scraping logs, and the like.  Useful, but not exactly groundbreaking. That said, I'm optimistic that IBM will expand its feature set in future updates, and pretty excited to see where they take it.

So, without further ado, here’s that quick guide to deploying the Eagle Agent.

Let’s get started!

(Note, that some information has been removed for privacy purposes but do no impact the How-To)

Description 
The objective of this document is to describe the steps on how to install and configure the Eagle Agent, that essentially connects Storage Protect instances into Defender DataProtect and discovery into DMS.
-    This document assumes the administrator has required access and knowledge of Defender DataProtect DMS.
-    This document assumes the administrator has required access and knowledge of Storage Protect.
-    This document assumes that you have a Linux RHEL server to run the agent from with proper firewall rules applied.

Hardware information 

The current setup of our Defender DataProtect nodes is built out of the box on Dell hardware, known as IBM Ready Nodes R750.  Refer to proper local documentation for connectivity and hardware configurations.

General steps 

Here are the general steps needed.

Pre-requisites:

1. Properly document required information and proceed with Infrastructure request.
   1.     Create infrastructure requests as needed.
   2.     Network configurations
      1. RHEL hosting server should be allowed to reach SP servers through firewall.
2. Properly document architecture diagram for ease of installation
3. Download Eagle Agent package from DMS portal.
4. On the Storage Protect server, where the OC is running, create a user called with admin rights. (can be named whatever you want)

Next Steps:

1. As root, log into RHEL server and upload Eagle agent package into a temporary location, like /tmp for example.
2. Create a user called “storage” on the RHEL server. (can be named whatever you want, for simplicity we used storage)
   1. Make sure /tmp is not in noexec mode.
3. # su – storage
4. # cd /tmp
5. # tar -xvf defender-eagle-tar.gz
6. # sudo ./install-eagle-agent.sh -u storage

Once installed, we can now register this agent into SP.

1. # cd /opt/ibm/defender/bin
2. # ./dcli server register --address SPSERVERNAME.DOMAIN.XX --port 1500 --name NAMEGIVEN --admin ADMINSP--password PASSWORDHERE --oc-url https://SPSERVERNAME.DOMAIN.XX :11090/oc --truststore-password TSPASSWORD
3. Where the following variables apply:
   1. SPSERVERNAME.DOMAIN.XX = Your SP server FQDN, where the OC is installed.
   2. NAMEGIVEN = Your choice of name to use and recognize your SP server within the Eagle Agent and Defender DP configurations.
   3. ADMINSP = The account username created within SP.
   4. PASSWORDHERE = The account's password that was created in SP.
   5. TSPASSWORD = The local Truststore password, which can be anything of your choosing, and based on your security requirements.

Once the Eagle Agent is properly registered within SP, it is now time to head back into DMS to create a token.

Create the Token and Copy it to be able to Paste it back into the Eagle Agent configuration.

1. # cd /opt/ibm/defender/bin
2. # dcli claim register --token=INSERTTOKENHERE (Paste the previously copied token)
   1. You should be presented with a response like so

At this point, your SP is registered within the Eagle Agent as well as claimed within your DMS installation.  You can now do various commands use the "dcli" command line program.  We can surely start the agent of course, so that it will show up within DMS like so:

• # /opt/ibm/defender/bin/dcli eagle-agent start

Once started, if you head back into your DMS installation, you should now see your SP instance, appear in the cluster section like so:

From here, you can configure email alerting to include your SP instance for simplicity purposes in your monitoring processes.

Other "dcli" commands include the following:

  server          Use the dcli server commands to manage registration of an IBM® Storage Protect server to Data Management.
  claim            Use the claim commands to register, query, or delete a claim for a registered IBM Storage Protect server
  eagle-agent Use the dcli eagle-agent commands to start, stop, or determine the status of the eagle agent.
  help             Help about any command

That is pretty much it, a simple installation, getting your SP instances reporting back to Defender DataProtect GUI, giving you monitoring options as well as positioning your Defender DataProtect installation up and ready for those forthcoming improvement IBM is hopefully working on.

Have a great Holiday Season folks, enjoy your time with Family and Friends.

See you all in 2025.

Stephan 

#SpectrumProtect#IBMDataProtection#DataProtectionSoftware#EagleAgent