In this post I would like to share some ideas around monitoring Azure Backup Server and backup jobs with Microsoft Operations Management Suite (OMS). OMS comes with a solution for Azure Backup. With this solution I can see that the Azure Backup vault protect 3 servers and is using a total of X GB. If I click on “3 registered servers” I can see that these three servers are my Azure Backup Servers. The machines that are being protected by the backup servers are not shown. As a backup administrator you often need to know more than number of backup servers and used space. In this blog post I will show you how to collect and visualize that information with OMS J

The first thing to do is to install the OMS agent on the Azure Backup Server. Once the agent installation is successfully completed it is time to configure OMS to collect DPM events. Add the DPM Backup Events, DPM Alerts and CloudBackup event logs under Settings/Data. But before any events are written to these event logs, Azure Backup Server needs to be configured to publish backup events and alerts. This configuration is done in the Microsoft Azure Backup console, in the Management workspace under Options.

Once backup related events are starting to come in to OMS it is time to configure filters to visualize what we want to see. The following filter will get all successfully backup jobs. Event ID 33222 is successful backup job and event id 33223 is failed backup job.

Type=Event EventLevelName=information EventID = 33222 TimeGenerated>NOW-8HOURS | sort Computer

But as you can see in the figure all values in the computer column is the Azure Backup Server. I would like to see what data source was protected and also on which server. To do this, you can use custom fields in OMS. With custom fields we can extract data from the event and index it as a new fields.

In the next two figures I have extracted protected server and data source from 33222 event and 33223 events, from the ParameterXML parameters. As you can see, we now have a column for the protected server and one column for the data source. We could combine this to one filter, showing both failed and successfully jobs. But I think it is better with two filters when we start using these filters in My Dashboard.

We could also run a query like this to get all machines and latest successfully backup

It can also be interesting with a filter to show all protected servers that don’t have a successful backup for last X hours. In my lab environment I have some events from before I extracted fields from the events, as you can see below.

Once we have our filters and saved them to favorites we can use them in My Dashboard. We now have a quick start overview of out backup jobs on the Azure Backup Server. Of course you can add a number of filters to get more information to your dashboard.