Monitor your backup

You can find more details about backup monitoring in the Help section.

This guide cover the specificity of the creation of a service monitoring your backup. for common task, take a look at Monitor your WEB server.

How it works

You have to configure your backup application to sent mail reports to the MagiKmon address attached to your monitoring service. MagiKmon can read the emails, get the status and extract some statistics like the size or the time of the backup. It will store these data including the original email into its database. When the backup failed or if no mail was received when expected, MagiKmon can generate an alert.

More than an alerting service

MagiKmon keeps data of each mail report received. You can consult them at any time, read the original email or any of its attachments. MagiKmon extract statistics from these mail reports and show them in tables or graphs. At one glance the user can see the evolution of its backup and the frequency of failures.

Create your first backup monitoring service

Go to the Service List, select Backup and click the Add button.

Here are the fields you have to fill in:
Description: Give a name to your backup.
State: Keep your service Enable to activate the monitoring.
Aliases: This is the name you give to your job in your backup application. Keep it empty if you don't want to compare both name. This help to garantee the good report is sent to the good service when monitoring multiple backups.
Software: Select the software used to backup your data. More softwares will be supported in the future.
Forward to: You can forward the original email to one of your mail contact if you want.
Time zone: This is the time zone of your backup host generating the mail report, default is the same as your account time zone, but if needed, you can choose a different one.
Time format: Some backup application use a host specific time and date format. This to help the parser. Check our documentation to now how to configure this. Auto should work most of the time.
Date format: Same as above.
Days of week, Day of month and Time limit: Define when do you expect to receive a backup report. Here I expect to receive a report at least before 11:30 on Tuesday for the backup started during the night from Monday to Tuesday. I expect a mail report for the other days too, except for the weekend. You can mix the use of Days of week and Day of month to meet your need. Here I expect to receive the report ot the monthly backup done on first Sunday. The report should be received on second Monday.
Nightly: This help to adjust MagiKmon reports. If set to yes, a backup started at 01:00 Tuesday morning will be displayed like a backup started during the Monday evening. This allow to mix on the same report, different backup started at different time during the same night.

Click the Submit button to create the monitoring service.

The Service

Take a look at your new monitoring service ! Your service has an email address, your backup application must send the backup report to this address. To solve the painful mail configuration MKSBackup provides a send mail via http feature. You can simply put the URL in the MKSBackup configuration ! Its has a Next check, if no backup report is received until then, the status will switch to failed. And finally the number of failures tell you about the number of failed or missing reports since the last good one.

The Time Line

After some days, the time line help you to visualize these failures for the last days.

Alerting

To be warned when something goes wrong, you need to create a monitor.

This time their is no grace period but the number of allowed failures. Zero means send an alert at the first failure.

Backup historic

Backup reports are archived and can be read. Statistics available in the reports are extracted and displayed in the table. More statistics can be seen clicking the more... link.
Sometime the report could be unrecognized by the parser (the blue bullet) or some parameters not found by the parser could be replaced by a dash. It is possible to force a reload of the report by the parser. The green and the orange diagrams show this.

The backup report

The backup report and all its attachments are available. Statistics are displayed on top of the report. When details about the different parts of the backup are available, they are shown in a table.

Here a report sent by MKSBackup used as front-end of ghettoVCB.sh.