It’s not enough just to configure, you need to monitor your backups

Perhaps the most well-known term in the IT is “backup”, even end users, who are not professionals in Information Technology, know it very well and have probably heard it several times. This reflects the fact of the importance of this practice in different situations and technologies, from simpler contexts such as a backup of WhatsApp messages to more critical situations, such as a database backup, for example.

 In an IT environment, several types of these “backups” may be being performed, they allow keeping the data saved so that if there is a deletion of data or even if they are corrupted, accidentally or not, to return with the data for production.

 In this sense, due to the relevance and criticality of some services and processes of the IT infrastructure, the backup configuration becomes necessary, if possible, in an automated way to make the operation of the team of professionals dynamic. However, it is not enough just to automate the process, it is necessary to know if it is being carried out as in an adverse event, the team will not be surprised with old and outdated copies.

 In this article, we’ll cover the case of a client that monitors, with SLAview, the backups (snapshots) of their AWS servers and how this monitoring is important for them.

Backup monitoring case on AWS servers

SLAview is a robust Telcomanager system that comes embedded in a proprietary appliance and scales according to any demand, monitoring the performance and failures of the entire IT environment of the client in question. Next, we will highlight how crucial it was for the client to monitor the backup of the AWS cloud servers.

When these servers were not yet monitored by SLAview, one of them presented a failure and the first attitude of the Cloud team staff, since this failure generated data loss, was to restore the data through the last backup performed. However, to the team surprise, the last backup accounted for was done months ago and this caused a loss of data on the part of the client.

In the meantime, the team asked Telcomanager to monitor the backup of these equipments through SLAview, so that if any backup was not performed within a few hours, an alarm was triggered to notify the Cloud team so that it would investigate the situation in question.

As SLAview is a versatile system, it allows for various types of collections, such as SNMP queries, ICMP, and even script-based collections that can be used to integrate with APIs. In this specific case, through the AWS API it was possible to collect backup information from the servers.

Now, whenever a backup is not performed on these machines, the responsible team is notified, providing that, in the event of any failure in the future, they are confident that the data has not been lost and can be recovered.

With this, two main problems were solved: First, the client does not need to access the environment to verify that the backup is being done, which is a costly procedure for employees and unreliable because at some point this can be forgotten. Second, as already mentioned, they no longer have to worry about data loss caused by server failures.

Integrations with SLAview

The case above was mentioned only as an example to elucidate this type of monitoring. However, the cases of integrations with other systems by SLAview are diverse, such as, for example, the integration with the Meraki (Cisco) portal of an SDWAN network of another large customer.

The Telcomanager solutions user has the freedom to assemble these integrations, as well as the freedom to request to our specialized technical support a specific monitoring that requires a specific integration, our tools, and solutions are extremely flexible.

Final considerations

Therefore, it is clear the importance of not only monitoring automated backup procedures, but also having a complete monitoring system as an ally to help you with the most difficult and complex tasks, such as the processes that require certain integrations to monitor.

With this in mind, Telcomanager, Latin America’s leader in the network management software industry, in the market since 2002 with a unique and innovative methodology, provides intelligent solutions for data monitoring in order to provide complete visibility to the customer’s infrastructure, allowing your company to keep track of the main aspects of your network.