Azure monitor is the native monitoring solution for Azure and few third party services. Monitoring a service via azure monitor lets us enhance the security and customize it based on our need. Below are the main benefits of using built-in Azure Monitor alerts for backup:

  • Ability to configure notifications to a wide range of notification channels supported by Azure Monitor
  • Ability to select which scenarios to get notified for
  • Ability to have a consistent alerts management experience for multiple Azure services including backup, with at-scale management capabilities

Built-in Azure Monitor Alerts for Azure Backup is now generally available. With this solution, users receive default alerts for critical scenarios related to backup security and job failures, that are integrated with Azure Monitor. You can monitor these alerts at scale via either the Azure Monitor dashboard or via Backup center, and route these alerts to various notification channels of choice.

Backup Items in Recovery Services vault

You can monitor all your backup items via a Recovery Services vault. Navigating to the Backup Instances section in Backup center opens a view that provides a detailed list of all backup items of the given workload type, with information on the last backup status for each item, latest restore point available, and so on.

Azure Backup also provides alerts via Azure Monitor that enables you to have a consistent experience for alert management across different Azure services, including Azure Backup. With Azure Monitor alerts, you can route alerts to any notification channel supported by Azure Monitor, such as email, ITSM, Webhook, Logic App, and so on.

Turning on Azure Monitor alerts for job failure scenarios

Built-in Azure Monitor alerts are generated for job failures by default. If you want to turn off alerts for these scenarios, you can edit the monitoring settings property of the vault accordingly. To opt in to Azure Monitor alerts for backup failure and restore failure scenarios, follow these steps:

To manage monitoring settings for a recovery services vault, follow these steps:

  1. Go to the vault and select Properties.
  2. Locate the Monitoring Settings vault property and select Update.Screenshot showing how to update monitoring settings in Recovery Services vault.
  3. In the context pane, select the appropriate options to enable/disable built-in Azure Monitor alerts for job failures depending on your requirement.Screenshot showing options to enable or disable built-in Azure Monitoring alerts.
  4. We also recommend you to select the checkbox Use only Azure Monitor alerts.By selecting this option, you’re consenting to receive backup alerts only via Azure Monitor and you’ll stop receiving alerts from the older classic alerts solution. Review the key differences between classic alerts and built-in Azure Monitor alerts.Screenshot showing the option to enable receiving backup alerts.
  5. Select Update to save the setting for the vault.

Consolidated alerts

For Azure workload backup solutions, such as SQL and SAP HANA, log backups can be generated frequently (up to every 15 minutes according to the policy). So, you might encounter frequent log backup failures (up to every 15 minutes). In this scenario, the end user will be overwhelmed if an alert is raised for each failure occurrence.

So, an alert is sent for the first occurrence, and if the later failures are because of the same root cause, then further alerts aren’t generated. The first alert is updated with the failure count. But if you’ve inactivated the alert, the next occurrence will trigger another alert and this will be treated as the first alert for that occurrence. This is how Azure Backup performs alert consolidation for SQL and SAP HANA backups.

On-demand backup jobs aren’t consolidated.

Exceptions when an alert isn’t raised

There are a few exceptions when an alert isn’t raised on a failure. They are:

  • You’ve explicitly canceled the running job.
  • The job fails because another backup job is in progress (no actions to be taken as we’ve to wait for the previous job to finish).
  • The VM backup job fails because the backed-up Azure VM no longer exists.
  • Consolidated Alerts (as mentioned above)

The exceptions above are designed from the understanding that the result of these operations (primarily user triggered) shows up immediately on portal/PS/CLI clients. So, you’re immediately aware and doesn’t need a notification.

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