Monitor the health of your backups using Azure Backup Metrics (preview)

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Azure Backup provides a set of built-in metrics via Azure Monitor that enable you to monitor the health of your backups. It also allows you to configure alert rules that trigger when the metrics exceed defined thresholds.

Azure Backup offers the following key capabilities:

  • Ability to view out-of-the-box metrics related to back up and restore health of your backup items along with associated trends
  • Ability to write custom alert rules on these metrics to efficiently monitor the health of your backup items
  • Ability to route fired metric alerts to different notification channels supported by Azure Monitor, such as email, ITSM, webhook, logic apps, and so on.

Learn more about Azure Monitor metrics.

Supported scenarios

  • Supports built-in metrics for the following workload types:

    • Azure VM, SQL databases in Azure VM
    • SAP HANA databases in Azure VM
    • Azure Files
    • Azure Blobs.

    Metrics for HANA instance workload type are currently not supported.

  • Metrics can be viewed for all Recovery Services vaults in each region and subscription at a time. Viewing metrics for a larger scope in the Azure portal is currently not supported. The same limits are also applicable to configure metric alert rules.

Supported built-in metrics

Currently, Azure Backup supports the following metrics:

  • Backup Health Events: The value of this metric represents the count of health events pertaining to backup job health, which were fired for the vault within a specific time. When a backup job completes, the Azure Backup service creates a backup health event. Based on the job status (such as succeeded or failed), the dimensions associated with the event vary.

  • Restore Health Events: The value of this metric represents the count of health events pertaining to restore job health, which were fired for the vault within a specific time. When a restore job completes, the Azure Backup service creates a restore health event. Based on the job status (such as succeeded or failed), the dimensions associated with the event vary.

Note

We support Restore Health Events only for Azure Blobs workload, as backups are continuous, and there's no notion of backup jobs here.

By default, the counts are surfaced at the vault level. To view the counts for a particular backup item and job status, you can filter the metrics on any of the supported dimensions.

The following table lists the dimensions that Backup Health Events and Restore Health Events metrics supports:

Dimension Name Description
Datasource ID The unique ID of the datasource associated with the job.

  • For Azure resources, such as VMs and Files, this contains the Azure Resource Manager ID (ARM ID) of the resource.
    For example, /subscriptions/00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000/resourceGroups/testRG/providers/Microsoft.Compute/virtualMachines/testVM


  • For SQL/HANA databases inside VMs, this contains the ARM ID of the VM followed by details of the database.
    For example, /subscriptions/00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000/resourceGroups/testRG/providers/Microsoft.Compute/virtualMachines/testVM/providers/Microsoft.RecoveryServices/backupProtectedItem/SQLDataBase;mssqlserver;msdb


For SQL AG database backup, the Datasource ID field is empty as there is no datasource (VM) in such scenarios. To view metrics for a particular database within an AG, use the Backup Instance ID field.
Datasource Type The type of the datasource associated with the job. Following are the supported datasource types:

  • Microsoft.Compute/virtualMachines (Azure Virtual Machines)


  • Microsoft.Storage/storageAccounts/fileServices/shares (Azure Files)


  • SQLDatabase (SQL in Azure VM)


  • SAPHANADataBase (SAP HANA in Azure VM)
Backup Instance ID The ARM ID of the backup instance associated with the job.

For example, /subscriptions/00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000/resourceGroups/testRG/providers/Microsoft.RecoveryServices/vaults/testVault/backupFabrics/Azure/protectionContainers/IaasVMContainer;iaasvmcontainerv2;testRG;testVM/protectedItems/VM;iaasvmcontainerv2;testRG;testVM
Backup Instance Name Friendly name of the backup instance for easy readability. It's of the format {protectedContainerName};{backupItemFriendlyName}.

For example, testStorageAccount;testFileShare
Health Status Represents the health of the backup item after the job had completed. It can take one of the following values: Healthy, Transient Unhealthy, Persistent Unhealthy, Transient Degraded, Persistent Degraded.

  • When a backup/restore job is successful, a health event with status Healthy appears.


  • Unhealthy appears to job failures due to service errors, and Degraded appears to failures due to user errors.


  • When the same error happens for the same backup item repeatedly, the state changes from Transient Unhealthy/Degraded to Persistent Unhealthy/Degraded.

Monitoring scenarios

View metrics in the Azure portal

To view metrics in the Azure portal, follow the below steps:

  1. Go to Backup center in the Azure portal and click Metrics from the menu.

    Screenshot showing to select Metrics in Backup center.

  2. Select a vault or a group of vaults for which you want to view metrics.

    Currently, the maximum scope for which you can view metrics is: All Recovery Services vaults in a particular subscription and region. For example, All Recovery Services vaults in East US in TestSubscription1.

  3. Select a metric to view Backup Health Events or Restore Health Events.

    This renders a chart which shows the count of health events for the vault(s). You can adjust the time range and aggregation granularity by using the filters at the top of the screen.

    Screenshot showing the process to select a metric.

  4. To filter metrics by different dimensions, click the Add Filter button and select the relevant dimension values.

    • For example, if you wish to see health event counts only for Azure VM backups, add a filter Datasource Type = Microsoft.Compute/virtualMachines.
    • To view health events for a particular datasource or backup instance within the vault, use the datasource ID/backup instance ID filters.
    • To view health events only for failed backups, use a filter on HealthStatus, by selecting the values corresponding to unhealthy or degraded health state.

    Screenshot showing the process to filter metrics by different dimensions.

Configure alerts and notifications on your metrics

To configure alerts and notifications on your metrics, follow these steps:

  1. Click New Alert Rule at the top of the metric charts.

  2. Select the scope for which you want to create alerts.

    The scope limits are the same as the limits described in the View metrics section.

  3. Select the condition on which the alert should be fired.

    By default, some fields are pre-populated based on the selections in the metric chart. You can edit the parameters as needed. To generate individual alerts for each datasource in the vault, use the dimensions selection in the metric alerts rule. Following are some scenarios:

    • Firing alerts on failed backup jobs for each datasource:

      Alert Rule: Fire an alert if Backup Health Events > 0 in the last 24 hours for:

      • Dimensions["HealthStatus"]= “Persistent Unhealthy / Transient Unhealthy”
      • Dimensions["DatasourceId"]= “All current and future values”

    • Firing alerts if all backups in the vault were successful for the day:

      Alert Rule: Fire an alert if Backup Health Events < 1 in the last 24 hours for:

      • Dimensions["HealthStatus"]="Persistent Unhealthy / Transient Unhealthy / Persistent Degraded / Transient Degraded"

    Screenshot showing the option to select the condition on which the alert should be fired.

    Note

    If you select more dimensions as part of the alert rule condition, the cost increases (that's proportional to the number of unique combinations of dimension values possible). Selection of more dimensions allows you to get more context on a fired alert.

  4. To configure notifications for these alerts using Action Groups, configure an Action Group as part of the alert rule, or create a separate action rule.

    We support various notification channels, such as email, ITSM, webhook, Logic App, SMS. Learn more about Action Groups.

    Screenshot showing the process to configure notifications for these alerts using Action Groups.

  5. Configure auto-resolution behavior - You can configure metric alerts as stateless or stateful as required.

    • To generate an alert on every job failure irrespective of the failure is due to the same underlying cause (stateless behavior), deselect the Automatically resolve alerts option in the alert rule.
    • Alternately, to configure the alerts as stateful, select the same checkbox. Therefore, when a metric alert is fired on the scope, another failure won't create a new metric alert. The alert gets auto-resolved if the alert generation condition evaluates to false for three successive evaluation cycles. New alerts are generated if the condition evaluates to true again.

Learn more about stateful and stateless behavior of Azure Monitor metric alerts.

Screenshot showing the process to configure auto-resolution behavior.

Managing Alerts

To view your fired metric alerts, follow these steps:

  1. Go to Backup center > Alerts.

  2. Filtering for Signal Type = Metric and Alert Type = Configured.

  3. Click an alert to view more details about the alert and change its state.

    Screenshot showing the process to view your fired metric alerts.

Note

The alert has two fields - Monitor condition (fired/resolved) and Alert State (New/Ack/Closed).

  • Alert state: Youcan edit this field (as shown in below screenshot).
  • Monitor condition: You can't edit this field. This field is used more in scenarios where the service itself resolves the alert. For example, auto-resolution behavior in metric alerts uses the Monitor condition field to resolve an alert.

Datasource alerts and Global alerts

Based on the alert rules configuration, the fired alert appears under the Datasource Alerts section or the Global Alerts section in Backup center:

  • If the alert has a datasource ID dimension associated with it, the fired alert appears under Datasource Alerts.
  • If the alert doesn't have a datasource ID dimension associated with it, the fired alert appears under Global Alerts as no information that ties the alert to a specific datasource is present.

Learn more about datasource and global alerts here

Note

Currently, in case of blob restore alerts, alerts appear under datasource alerts only if you select both the dimensions - datasourceId and datasourceType while creating the alert rule. If any dimensions aren't selected, the alerts appear under global alerts.

Accessing metrics programmatically

You can use the different programmatic clients, such as PowerShell, CLI, or REST API, to access the metrics functionality. See Azure Monitor REST API documentation for more details.

Sample alert scenarios

Fire a single alert if all triggered backups for a vault were successful in last 24 hours

Alert Rule: Fire an alert if Backup Health Events < 1 in last 24 hours for:

Dimensions["HealthStatus"] != "Healthy"

Fire an alert after every failed backup job

Alert Rule: Fire an alert if Backup Health Events > 0 in last 5 minutes for:

  • Dimensions["HealthStatus"]!= "Healthy"
  • Dimensions["DatasourceId"]= "All current and future values"

Fire an alert if there were consecutive backup failures for the same item in last 24 hours

Alert Rule: Fire an alert if Backup Health Events > 1 in last 24 hours for:

  • Dimensions["HealthStatus"]!= "Healthy"
  • Dimensions["DatasourceId"]= "All current and future values"

Fire an alert if no backup job was executed for an item in last 24 hours

Alert Rule: Fire an alert if Backup Health Events < 1 in the last 24 hours for:

Dimensions["DatasourceId"]= "All current and future values"

Next steps