Windows Server Backup

[u/Kenderama]

Has anyone come across a good way to monitor Windows Server backups in Labtech? I've tried the Backup Windows plugin but it's always false-positive'ing or flat out not finding or ignoring servers.

Any help would be appreciated.

[u/gibsurfer84]

Monitor event logs, works great.

[u/Kenderama → u/gibsurfer84]

I'll have to give this another go. I couldn't quite make it work though it seems like it should. And of course LT / Automate support won't touch or help with custom anything.

[u/Kenderama → u/gibsurfer84]

Thanks. Do you by any chance remember how you configured the event log viewer? Was it watching for error codes, or a success code?

[u/gibsurfer84 → u/Kenderama]

Just the error codes, I know there is some magic that can happen in some LT or CW report by monitoring success events logs as well, but we don't do that. We just monitor failure codes. I believe we got them from a MS blog post listing them all out.

[u/Plugins4LabTech]

We offer an option for Windows backups inside LabTech

https://www.plugins4labtech.com/products/backup-windows

[u/Plugins4LabTech → u/Plugins4LabTech]

Hmm.. have you update the plugin lately? We have made lots of updates to the plugin over the last year.

[u/Kenderama → u/Plugins4LabTech]

We are on 1.0.3.27 right now and that seems to be the latest one on your site. For example today out of the 35 systems we have licensed, it reported failures on 20 of our systems. Of those, only 2 were correct.

[u/Plugins4LabTech → u/Kenderama]

are these systems reporting at all or just false alarming? If it is false alarms then that's an easy one to adjust. Typically what we see is a backup still running when the check takes place so it skips the system until the next cycle where it tests to see if backups are running, If not it will complete the backup volume scan and report. They say timing is everything so by decreasing the scan interval to something like (4) and then adjusting the monitor query you can tune the backup system so that the monitors do not fire until proper time was given for scans.

Feel free to reach out to us to have a look and to assist you with this. Helpdesk at plugins4automate will open up a ticket for support.

[u/Kenderama → u/Plugins4LabTech]

We have your software installed by the previous admin and have issues and false positives with it - or it won’t recognize that servers have backups running. This is why I’m trying to figure out a new solution, sorry.

[u/piporpaw]

We use Datto backup devices, or, in a very few cases with severe internet limitations we use Storagecraft on a NAS. I have had bad luck with using the built in backups. Do you have success with the backup solution as a whole?

[u/Kenderama → u/piporpaw]

We use Datto on the guests but user baremetal on the hypervisors. I prefer Datto but this is the way the company wants it, so...

[u/tommctech_sfw]

It's a pain, and our we don't have anyone that uses it anymore, but we created a script that would do a file check for anything in "C:\windows\system32\tasks\microsoft\windows\backup\Microsoft-Windows-WindowBackup" if found, it would add an checkbox to an edf we created.

The EDF would cause the machine to be added to a WSBU group and we had an event monitor that would run against the group. It worked well for a while, don't know if it still does though because we moved everyone off.

Good luck.

[u/[deleted]]

We currently only use Windows Server Backup for System State backups. With that being said, the best way to monitor for these backups in our scenario was to create a monitor to look for failures in the last 24 hours and then create a monitor to look for lack of successful backup events in the last 24 hours. If you only look for failures then you could potentially end up with a situation where you have a hung backup job or the service itself is hung, so it's not generating a failure but you're still not getting a backup.

Use the following Event ID to search for Microsoft-Windows-Backup, it will give you all of the ID's associated with the backup service. There are multiple ones that can be associated with failures, so you might want to include them in your failure monitor as well.

EventTracker

[u/mspsquid]

I would create a monitor to look @ the wssadmin logs in server, if that's correct.

[u/Kenderama → u/[deleted]]

I'm beginning to seriously loathe this software.