The Minion backup alerts are some of the most comprehensive in the industry. The functionality and flexibility are unmatched.
We strive to make our backup alerts both easy to manage and actionable. Here are some of our favorite features:
- Global reporting settings.
- Global deferments.
- Global exclusions.
- Global thresholds.
- Availability Group aware.
- No event storms
- Alert on warnings
- Multiple schedules
- Missing backups
Global Reporting Settings
We simply love this feature. Most of the time when you configure your backup alerts, you need to do it at the server level. That means that doing things like changing thresholds, or frequency of alerts, etc. is configured on each server. And while that's fine for small shops, the more servers you have the more unmanageable it becomes. Not only that, but managing DBMail on all those servers is not only cumbersome, but also error prone. One of the major issues is that without warning DBMail can simply stop working on any of those servers so you could have failing backups for weeks without knowing it because your alerts aren't being sent. With Minion you have a single alerting server to manage.
Global Deferments
It's never been easy to manage when you need to ignore an alert. So why would you need to ignore an alert you ask? Well let's take a simple situation where you have a known issue like a NAS having issues and you missed last night's backups on several servers. You're not going to be able to take the backups now because the business day has already begun and you can't risk using the resources. So you decide to just run log backups today and wait for tonight's full backup. Meanwhile you're still getting full backup alerts all day. Traditionally you would have to go around to each server to either disable the alerts, or exclude certain DBs from the alerts on those servers. This is not only time consuming, but it's also error prone. And don't forget, you still have to remember to go around tomorrow and enable them all again.
But with Minion you can easily defer any backup alert in a single location. You can defer hundreds of servers and thousands of DBs just as easily as you can a single DB on a single server. Not only that, but since deferments have an end date, you don't have to remember to go back and re-enable them. This process isn't disruptive to the system because you're just managing settings. You can even program logic into your own custom deferment routines to automatically handle certain conditions.
Global Exclusions
The true power of Minion shines in this feature. You can not only exclude a DB on a server, but it goes much further than that. You can easily exclude multiple DBs on a server. And you can exclude a single DB on any server it resides on. A good example of that is maybe you have a test DB that exists on different servers in n different environments. You can exclude it from backup alerts across your whole shop as easily as you can on a single server.
Now let's take the scenario where you have different test DBs on lots of servers in your shop, and maybe they keep getting created and dropped every couple days. So maybe they're given a date format similar to 'Test20181020'. You can exclude all of these based on a regex expression so that no matter what the current iteration of the test DB is, it'll never be alerted on. And you can define as many regex expressions as you like.
There's another situation where Minion shines that is difficult to do in other products. Let's say that you've got read-only DBs in your environment. And let's also say that there are a lot of them and they're on a different backup schedule than the rest. Afterall, there's no need to backup read-only DBs every day. Perhaps you only back them up as part of your end of month routine. You can easily exclude these DBs based on the fact that they're read-only so you won't get alerted about them every day.
Global Thresholds
You can also set thresholds with the same power you have with exclusions. Individual servers and DBs can be put on customized alerting schedules based on their needs. That means that in the read-only scenario above, you can not only exclude them, but you can also have them put on a monthly alerting schedule. And all this is as easy as configuring a single alert on a single server.
Availability Group Aware
Minion has very smart backup alerts. It knows that a DB is part of an AG so it won't alert on missing backups. Here's the scenario. You have a 4-node AG with a Prod1 DB on all nodes. When you take backups, the backup date isn't logged on each server. So at any given time 3 of the nodes will show that Prod1 hasn't been backed up. That's just not accurate because it was backed up. What's more, the backups can at any time run on any of the nodes. Minion is smart enough to recognize this and report on the AG scenario appropriately.
No Event Storms
Event storms are a big issue in almost every shop. Let me take a minute to explain event storms. You have a NAS or network issue one night and 300 servers miss their backups. With other products you would get at least 300 emails, one for each server, and depending on the mechanism, it may even be one for each DB. That can be thousands of emails for a single known issue. But with Minion, you get enterprise alerts. That means that instead of 300 emails, you get a single email with 300 items in it. This makes it much easier to manage, and again, since you can defer them all at once, you get a huge portion of your day back.
Alert on Warnings
This is a unique feature. The purpose of backup jobs is to backup the DB. However, there are other parts of a backup routine. You can copy or move files to different locations, backup certificates, delete old backup files, etc. And since the backup's job is to back up, these other operations are often never alerted on. However, Minion considers these warnings (since the actual DB was backed up) and alerts on them. This is huge because you need to know if that file didn't get copied, or if that cert didn't get backed up. This is of course configurable. You don't have to alert on these warnings if you don't want to.
Multiple Schedules
This one is really cool and really shows off the power of Minion... again. Let's look at a scenario. You have a situation where your production DB is really busy during the week so you take log backups every 15 mins, but on the weekends the activity is very low. And you haven't adjusted your backup schedule for the weekend, so you're still taking logs every 15 mins, but you're not as concerned about the alerts since there's little chance of the drives filling up. In this case you don't want to alert on missing log backups every 15 mins, or even ever 30 mins; you want to alert every 6 hrs, or maybe even just once a day on Saturday and Sunday.
With Minion this scenario is fairly simple. You can setup multiple alerting schedules and have them flipped on and off depending on the day, or even time of day. So you could take the same scenario above and apply it to a single day where you want a different alerting schedule after 5pm.
Missing Backups
The criteria you use to determine what to alert on is as important as anything else. It keeps you from having false positives and missing important alerts. We've already discussed some of these, like the AG-aware alerts. It's important to know that the DB is in an AG so you don't get false positives. Another criterion that's largely overlooked is missing backups vs. failed backups.
Minion alerts on missing backups, not failed backups. I'll outline a simple scenario. You've got a server where someone turns off the SQL Agent. And with the agent off, the backup jobs never start. Therefore, the backups never fail because they never ran. However, Minion checks on the last time the backup was taken and if it's past the threshold you've setup it alerts you. For alerting purposes it doesn't matter why the backup is missing, only that it's missing. So this is why we alert on missing backups and not failed backups. And since alerts are run centrally, you don't have to worry about individual SQL Agents being turned off and missing your alerts.
Related Topics
Understanding the Minion Backup History Collection Process