Monitoring and Reporting solutions for Azure Backup
This article provides an overview of different monitoring and reporting solutions provided by Azure Backup.
Azure Backup offers integration with various Azure services, such as Azure Resource Graph, Azure Monitor Alerts, Azure Monitor Logs (Log Analytics), and Azure Resource Health. Azure Backup also offers interfaces to various Azure clients, such as Azure portal, Azure PowerShell, Azure CLI, and Azure REST API. Depending on your monitoring and reporting requirements, you can use a combination of these integrations.
Important
Classic alerts for Azure Backup will be deprecated on 31 March 2026. We recommend you to migrate to Azure Monitor Alerts for a seamless experience.
Monitoring and Reporting scenarios
The following sections provide an overview of the different monitoring and reporting scenarios that commonly arise in enterprise backup deployments. Today, Azure Backup provides the capabilities for each scenario, along with the relevant document references.
| Scenario | Outcome | Solutions available |
|---|---|---|
| Track backup related jobs and health | Identify gaps in the backup estate and make corrections if the expectation isn't met. | - Built-in on Azure Business Continuity Center: You can monitor backup jobs in real time via the Azure Business Continuity Center dashboard. - Activity Logs: You can use standard Activity Logs for your vaults to view information on various user-triggered actions, such as modification of backup policies, restoration of a backup item, and so on. - Customized monitoring dashboards: Azure Backup allows you to use non-portal clients, such as PowerShell, CLI, and REST API, to query backup monitoring data for use in your custom dashboards. You can also query your backups at scale (across vaults, subscriptions, regions, and Lighthouse tenants) using Azure Resource Graph (ARG). - Azure Monitor Metrics (preview): Azure Backup provides health metrics via Azure Business Continuity Center and Azure Monitor, which shows granular details about the health of protected items under a vault. Azure backup provides metrics at vault level to monitor backup and restore health events. This also allows you to configure alerts and notifications on these metrics. You can also use Resource health to monitor the health of your Recovery Services vault and Backup vaults to troubleshoot service errors causing resource health issues. |
| Get alerted to critical backup incidents | Take quick reactive actions in case of an issue. | - Built-in alerts using Azure Monitor: Azure Backup provides an alerting solution based on Azure Monitor for critical scenarios, such as security and failed jobs: deletion of backup data, disabling of soft-delete, backup failures, and restore failures etc. You can view and manage these alerts via Azure Business Continuity Center. To configure notifications for these alerts (emails), you can use Action rules of Azure Monitor and Action groups to route alerts to a wide range of notification channels. - Custom alerts: If you've scenarios where an alert needs to be generated based on custom logic, you can use ARG based alerts or Log Analytics based alerts. ARG based alerts are appropriate for scenarios that need real time alerting however, due to the current frequency at which data in a Log Analytics workspace is updated. Log Analytics based alerts must be used for scenarios where it's acceptable to have a short time difference between the occurrence of the actual incident and the generation of the alert. Log Analytics based alerts can be configured provided you've set up your vaults to send diagnostics data to a Log Analytics (LA) workspace. You can also configure alerts on Activity Logs or export these logs to a Log Analytics workspace for long-term retention. - Azure Backup Metric Alerts using Azure Monitor (preview): You can write custom alert rules using Azure Monitor metrics to monitor the health of your backup items across different KPIs. Metrics based alerts are recommended when you are looking for a status signal like success or failure of jobs and not details. You can use metric alerts to get alerted on job success. Learn more. - Classic Alerts: This is the older alerting solution, which you can access using the Backup Alerts tab in the Recovery Services vault blade. These alerts don't appear in Business Continuity Center and are being deprecated. If you're using classic alerts, we recommend you migrate to using one or more of the Azure Monitor based alert solutions (described above) as it's the forward-looking solution for alerting. |
| Analyze historical trends | Provides targeted proof for audit and executive reports seamlessly. | - Built-in reports: You can use Backup Reports (based on Azure Monitor Logs) to analyze historical trends related to job success, backup usage and discover optimization opportunities for your backups. You can also configure periodic emails for these reports. - Out-of-box reports: It provides out of box reports on Azure Business Continuity Center that can be consumed for analyzing historical data. These reports also act as sample templates that can be edited to cater to your reporting requirements. You can also query the data in Azure Monitor Logs (LA) using the documented system functions to create your own report (using workbooks) to analyze historical information related to your backups. |
Key benefits of Azure Monitor alerts
Azure Monitor for Azure Backup provides the following key benefits:
Configure notifications to a wide range of notification channels: Azure Monitor supports a wide range of notification channels, such as email, ITSM, webhooks, logic apps, and so on. You can configure notifications for backup alerts to any of these channels without investing much time in creating custom integrations.
Enable notifications for selective scenarios: With Azure Monitor alerts, you can choose the scenarios to be notified about. Also, you can enable notifications for test subscriptions.
Monitor alerts at-scale via Azure Business Continuity Center: In addition to enabling you to manage the alerts from Azure Monitor dashboard, Azure Backup also provides an alert management experience tailored to backups via Azure Business Continuity Center. This allows you to filter alerts by backup specific properties, such as workload type, vault location, and so on, and a way to get quick visibility into the active backup security alerts that need attention.
Manage alerts and notifications programmatically: You can use Azure Monitor’s REST APIs to manage alerts and notifications via non-portal clients as well.
Consistent alert management for multiple Azure services, including backup: Azure Monitor is the native service for monitoring resources across Azure. With the integration of Azure Backup with Azure Monitor, you can manage backup alerts in the same way as alerts for other Azure services, without requiring a separate learning curve.
Azure Monitor alerts for Azure Backup
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.
Currently, Azure Backup provides two main types of built-in alerts:
- Security Alerts: For scenarios, such as deletion of backup data, or disabling of soft-delete functionality for vault, security alerts (of severity Sev 0) are fired, and displayed in the Azure portal or consumed via other clients (PowerShell, CLI, and REST API). Security alerts are generated by default and can't be turned off. However, you can control the scenarios for which the notifications (for example, emails) should be fired. For more information on how to configure notifications, see Action rules.
- Job Failure Alerts: For scenarios, such as backup failure and restore failure, Azure Backup provides built-in alerts via Azure Monitor (of Severity Sev 1). Unlike security alerts, you can choose to turn off Azure Monitor alerts for job failure scenarios. For example, you've already configured custom alert rules for job failures via Log Analytics, and don't need built-in alerts to be fired for every job failure. By default, alerts for job failures are turned on. For more information, see the section on turning on alerts for these scenarios.
The following table summarizes the different backup alerts currently available via Azure Monitor and the supported workload/vault types:
| Alert Category | Alert Name | Supported workload types / vault types | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| Security | Delete Backup Data | - Microsoft Azure Virtual Machine - SQL in Azure VM (non-AG scenarios) - SAP HANA in Azure VM - Azure Backup Agent - DPM - Azure Backup Server - Azure Database for PostgreSQL Server - Azure Blobs - Azure Managed Disks |
This alert is fired when you stop backup and deletes backup data. Note If you disable the soft delete feature for the vault, Delete Backup Data alert isn't received. |
| Security | Upcoming Purge | - Azure Virtual Machine - SQL in Azure VM - SAP HANA in Azure VM |
For all workloads that support soft-delete, this alert is fired when the backup data for an item is 2 days away from being permanently purged by the Azure Backup service. |
| Security | Purge Complete | - Azure Virtual Machine - SQL in Azure VM - SAP HANA in Azure VM |
Delete Backup Data |
| Security | Soft Delete Disabled for Vault | Recovery Services vaults | This alert is fired when the soft-deleted backup data for an item has been permanently deleted by the Azure Backup service. |
| Security | Modify Policy with Shorter Retention | - Azure Virtual Machine - SQL in Azure VM - SAP HANA in Azure VM - Azure Files |
This alert is fired when a backup policy is modified to use lesser retention. |
| Security | Modify Protection with Shorter Retention | - Azure Virtual Machine - SQL in Azure VM - SAP HANA in Azure VM - Azure Files |
This alert is fired when a backup instance is assigned to a different policy with lesser retention. |
| Security | MUA Disabled | Recovery Services vaults | This alert is fired when a user disables MUA functionality for vault. |
| Security | Disable hybrid security features | Recovery Services vaults | This alert is fired when hybrid security settings are disabled for a vault. |
| Jobs | Backup Failure | - Azure Virtual Machine - SQL in Azure VM - SAP HANA in Azure VM - Azure Backup Agent - Azure Files - Azure Database for PostgreSQL Server - Azure Managed Disks |
This alert is fired when a backup job failure has occurred. By default, alerts for backup failures are turned on. For more information, see the section on turning on alerts for this scenario. |
| Jobs | Restore Failure | - Azure Virtual Machine - SQL in Azure VM (non-AG scenarios) - SAP HANA in Azure VM - Azure Backup Agent - Azure Files - Azure Database for PostgreSQL Server - Azure Blobs - Azure Managed Disks |
This alert is fired when a restore job failure has occurred. By default, alerts for restore failures are turned on. For more information, see the section on turning on alerts for this scenario. |
| Jobs | Unsupported backup type | - SQL in Azure VM - SAP HANA in Azure VM |
This alert is fired when the current settings for a database don't support certain backup types present in the policy. By default, alerts for unsupported backup type scenario are turned on. For more information, see the section on turning on alerts for this scenario. |
| Jobs | Workload extension unhealthy | - SQL in Azure VM - SAP HANA in Azure VM |
This alert is fired when the Azure Backup workload extension for database backups is in an unhealthy state that might prevent future backups from succeeding. By default, alerts for workload extension unhealthy scenario are turned on. For more information, see the section on turning on alerts for this scenario. |
Note
- For Azure VM backup, backup failure alerts are not sent in scenarios where the underlying VM is deleted, or another backup job is already in progress (leading to failure of the other backup job). This is because these are scenarios where backup is expected to fail by design and hence alerts are not generated in these 2 cases.