Microsoft announced, in a cryptic way, that Azure Backup has “additional monitoring and alerting capabilities”. Let’s focus on alerting because that’s been a huge request for Azure Backup. Every single meeting I’ve had on the subject included the question “does it do alerts?” and the answer for the last 2.5 years was “no, but it’s coming”. Finally, it’s here! For some customers.
If you are using the recovery services vault – Azure Backup in the Azure Portal – then you’re in luck. Open your vault and browse to Settings. Click Alerts & Events.
Click Backup Alerts – note that Site Recovery Events (alerting for ASR DR) has been available for quite a while.
The Backup Alerts dialog opens. This is where all alerts will be displayed. You can filter the information in this blade based on severity, status, time and date. We’ll continue with setting up email notifications.
Click Configure Notifications
Enable notifications.
Enter the email addresses (preferably of mail groups and systems, not people) that you want the alerts to go to. Use a semi-colon ( ; ) to separate multiple addresses.
Choose if you want to get 1 email per alert or if you want an hourly digest.
And select what kinds of alerts you want to be notified about. Maybe Warning and Critical would be best, but some of you like to know about successful backups (you tape-loving lugs).
Click Save. And you are done.
But what if you are one of the customers that has been using Azure Backup, maybe for years, via the backup vault in the classic Management Portal? Sorry – no alerting for you. I hope that Azure Backup creates a way to migrate customers from the backup vault to the recovery services vault, including the ability to migrate to a different subscription (e.g. Open/direct/EA to CSP).