Getting “Unable to get disk information for backup host” errors when running vertica backups

Products

• Network Observability
• CA Performance Management

Issue/Introduction

When we run vertica backups for the 3 node cluster, saving to an nfs share, we are seeing these messages in the output and the logs:

…
'HOSTNAME', '/opt/vertica/oss/python3/bin/python3']
2025-09-25 02:00:35 localhost vbr Unable to get disk information for backup host: xx.xx.xx.xx, mount point: /vertica_db. Disk space check skipped on this disk.
2025-09-25 02:00:35 localhost vbr Unable to get disk information for backup host: xx.xx.xx.xx, mount point: /vertica_db. Disk space check skipped on this disk.
2025-09-25 02:00:35 localhost vbr Unable to get disk information for backup host: xx.xx.xx.xx, mount point: /vertica_db. Disk space check skipped on this disk.
…

This is seen both manually and using cron to run the backups.

Environment

 DX NetOps :: All Supported Versions

Cause

The vbr.py script tries to execute a python command on the storage target to read the available free space.

In this case, either python3 is not installed on the target host, or dradmin user does not have local permission to use it.

Resolution

The vbr.py script logs the error, and continues the backup.

This message will not prevent the backup from running.