Microsoft is transforming the Azure Backup platform into a reliable solution for managing the virtual machines protection after all Azure Backup is one of the “low-hanging fruits” available for IT admins that want to start trying cloud solutions. Now they are previewing the Azure Backup pre-checks to guarantee a clean and straightforward process when you are protecting your workloads.
Backup solutions for on-prem platforms can get complex, we all know that, with several variables that might affect the health status of backups: Agents not communicating properly, network problems, insufficient resources to execute the backup job, inconsistent files that might generate a failure in the backup process, etc. And not all of the enterprise solution can provide a reliable way to alert of any issues.
Azure Backup pre-checks works to solve all those issues proactively and therefore guaranteeing the IT admins to execute a successful job backup, always. The pre-checks basically reviews the VMs where the backup job will execute and inform any potential issues in the Recovery Services Vault dashboard, including the recommended actions to mitigate those issues. And yes, no additional cost to use these pre-checks.
The Azure Backup pre-checks will verify several parameters to ensure file-consistent and application-consistent, whenever applies, to obtain a successful backup every time. The different states of the pre-check for Azure Backup are:
- Passed: This state indicates that your VMs configuration is ready for successful backups, no additional action is needed.
- Warning: This state indicates one or more issues in VM’s configuration that might lead to backup failures and provides recommended steps to ensure successful backups. Not having the latest VM Agent installed, for example, can cause backups to fail intermittently and falls in this class of issues.
- Critical: This state indicates one or more critical issues in the VM’s configuration that will lead to backup failures and provides required steps to ensure successful backups. A network issue caused due to an update to the NSG rules of a VM, for example, will fail backups as it prevents the VM from communicating with the Azure Backup service and falls in this class of issues.
