Notification Improvement suggestion

[vmbackupuser]

It would be handy to be able to suppress the warning & failure emails for each backup job until the final Job Retry is done. Rather than having numerous email alerts of failure generated throughout the night, only for the pen-ultimate or final retry to be actually 'successful', as this final alert would supercede all previous failure alerts for that job from earlier that night.

This would reduce the number of emails generated (usually over the weekend), particularly when 99% (or even 100%) of the nightly jobs finally do complete with 'Success' after automatic Retries.

[Gostev]

Interesting. Why do you have so many backup failures, did you ever researched this? Is there some storage layer issues? I've never seen failed backup/retry on the ESX host with my lab...

As for reducing the number of alerts, have you considered using daily summary emails provided by Veeam Backup Enterprise Manager?

[davidshq]

I have seen similar issues. Issues can be too much activity on the network, a down file server, etc. The number of alerts is annoying - it would be nice to have the option to get an individual email (not a daily summary) when the final retry failed.
Dave.

[JasonJoel]

[merged]

Instead of getting an email on every failure, I would MUCH prefer to only get an email from the system if the job AND all of its retries fail.

My reasoning here is:
1. If the job + 3 retries fail, I get four emails. Yuck.
2. If the job fails the first attempt, but it successful on a retry I really don't care. It backed up, so no email necessary.

Thoughts?

Jason Bottjen

[Gostev]

I can say that I heard both opinions by now (and both of them many times). Bunch of people actually like to be notified about each failure that caused retry (because this is definitely not "normal" for job to fail, and always needs to be looked at - normally, retries should not be happening at all). In fact, somebody have just talked to me about this in conjunction of improving these retry emails (add retry count to each email, and number of retries it took on final "Success" email). Other bunch of people wants what you are asking about. So, it sounds like there is no one-size-fits-all solution, and the option is needed to control the behavior. I have put this on the feature tracker. Thanks.

[JasonJoel]

Thanks!

We don't often get failure emails, so it isn't THAT bad. I'll mainly get them when I delete/rebuild a VM and forget to edit the backup job and add/remove it there (to update the uniquie identifier). Maybe once or twice a month we'll get a snapshot being blocked due to the server being 'busy', and then it succedes on attempt #2.

Jason

[greendx]

[merged]

Is it possible to get a notification of a successful job only after a failure?

What I mean is, I used to receive success, warning and failure notifications but due to the volume of emails I am only getting failure notifications. I made this change yesterday and on the first night I had the following happen. A job failed for some reason and I was sent a notification. This morning when I got in to the office I looked at the job and saw that it was successful, meaning that on its first retry it ran okay. Since I am not sending success notifications I obviously never got one. It would be nice to be able to have an option to get success / warning notifications only in retry situations.


Thanks,
Eugene

[averylarry]

I'd like to add my voice to this request.

As far as I'm able to tell, a given VM will fail if a different Veeam job already has a snapshot on it, the first run through. This is very common as I have replication jobs running almost constantly. (The error is "RemoveSnapshot failed".) On the retry, it gives the exact same error, but this time it's only a warning and it actually completes the job.

I find it frustrating to get 20 emails at different times, and I have to wade through them to decide if anything failed-but-eventually-worked-with-a-warning. Not to mention it's annoying to figure out which VM's are affected. (Not to mention I have to manually fix snapshots that don't get properly removed all the time.)

I think a lot of improvement could be done in notification options. I'll admit I haven't looked much at the Enterprise Manager. But I'd prefer email notifications by virtual machine, instead of by job -- at least with failure notices. I'd like multiple Veeam servers to be aware of each other -- to be able to tolerate the issue where there's already a Veeam snapshot from a different server. Enterprise Manager might be a better place to generate notifications -- multiple Veeam servers can report to Enterprise Manager and then optionally you could have a consolidated summary that includes retries OR you can have verbose-every-job-no-matter-what option.

[wonderboy]

Can we have this feature in next version? We have sites that are configured to send failure messages to an automated help system, so we can investigate. We dont need 4 separate jobs craeted each time there is a backup failure, which is what happens at present.

If you want to see a great implementation of notifications, Backup Exec has everything that I believe is required. Now if they only had the VM backup quality of Veeam...

Thanks

[Gostev]

Guess this happens because they are spending too much time on coding perfect notifications, while we are focusing on backup quality

[pizzim13]

Can we have this feature in next version? We have sites that are configured to send failure messages to an automated help system, so we can investigate. We dont need 4 separate jobs craeted each time there is a backup failure, which is what happens at present.

If you want to see a great implementation of notifications, Backup Exec has everything that I believe is required. Now if they only had the VM backup quality of Veeam...

Thanks

You can always roll your own
PowerShell Veeam backup status report