Our backup job runs but we miss an alert when it fails, how do we guarantee we'll know?
Classic 'backup failing for 3 months unnoticed'. Fix isn't one more email, it's alerting with a dead-man's switch: alarm on failure AND alarm on silence.
Try this first
- 1Configure success and failure mails per backup job. Send to a shared mailbox (backup@company.com) or ticketing tool, not one person. Person sick or gone = blackout.
- 2More important: set up a dead-man's switch. Healthchecks.io, Cronitor or a custom Grafana dashboard expects a ping per successful run. No ping = alert.
- 3For cloud backup tools with APIs: scrape status yourself and log to your monitoring. Veeam, NAKIVO, Synology have REST APIs. Without your own monitoring you trust only the vendor.
- 4Multiple channels: email, Slack or Teams, SMS for genuinely critical jobs. A mail in spam isn't an alert.
- 5Test alerting: deliberately disable a job and check whether the alert fires. No alert in 24h = your alerting doesn't work as you thought.
- 6Schedule a weekly review: someone looks at the dashboard Friday morning, separate from automated alerts. That catches subtle issues (job suddenly runs faster, retention filling up) that alerts miss.
When to bring us in
With multiple backup tools at once, monitoring becomes a puzzle. A central tool like Veeam ONE, NinjaRMM or an MSP that runs it can take the overhead. Ask for a review.
See also
- We have backups but we do not know if they workA backup that cannot be restored is not a backup. Testing matters as much as taking the backup.
- Suspected ransomware: what to do RIGHT NOWThe first 30 minutes are critical. One wrong move spreads the damage. Read before acting.
- Someone accidentally deleted an important folderUsually fine to recover. The trick: do not save anything new on that drive until you know how.
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