How to check the status of Azure Backups in the backup dashboard built with the Microsoft Power BI

Recently we have seen blue screen error in one of the Azure Windows VM and after lot’s of troubleshooting steps when we not able to rectify the issue and (before opening a case with Microsoft) we have thought to check with the backup team so that we can restore the VM from the Azure backup vault but unfortunately this VM backup job was failing from day one and no one has noticed the issue, which is not an isolated case and it may happens to any enterprises who are aggressively moving to Azure.

Azure backup is one of the important task once the VM build is over and generally this is taken care by the backup team in large organisations. In recent days we have seen hundreds of subscriptions and thousands of VM’s so it’s becoming a very tedious job for the Azure backup administrators to check and maintain the staus of the backup of Azure VM’s everyday.

And regular backup of the of the Azure VM is also very important.

One way to check the status of the VM is to write a custom powershell script which you can run against the Azure Recovery Services Vault to check the backup status and can schedule that in a Azure Runbook and the second option is to configure the Azure Backup reports to be viewd in Power BI. In this blog post I am going to show you how to configure Azure Backup Reports with Power BI.

To configure the backup reports and dashboard first go the Recovery Services vaults which we have configured for our backup. As you can see we have got many recovery services vaults in my subscription so we will choose some of them where we need the backup reporting need to be configured.

Once we select the backup vault the next step is click on the Backup Reports

In the next step we need to select the Diagnostics settings, here we can turn on the diagnostics for the backup reports

This diagnostics settings are very important where we can configure the storage account and the logs which we want to capture in our report. I have selected the Azure backup report logs which will helps me determining the status of the Azure VM.

You need to select a storage account where we can archive the storage logs and if we have any plans to view the data in OMS, we need to select the checkbox of Send the data to Log Analytics.

Now in this step we will need to configure the Power BI dashboard. The first step here is to login to Power BI which is a part of the O365 offering and the license is part of your O365 license pack.

To do this we need to login to this URL

https://powerbi.microsoft.com/

The website will look like this.

Once we login to with our MS account or organisation account we can select on the Services and click on Get button.

Once we click on the get button we can see the list of the Apps of Power BI listed

In next step we need to Select the Azure Backup tile and click on the Get it now button.

Now the next step is to connect to Azure Backup, here we need to select the Azure Storage Account from where we need to pick up the backup data.

Here we hit an error. As you can see below the backup report is not yet ready since it’s not yet 24 hrs. since we have configured the backup reporting. So we have to wait for 24 hrs. to get the back up data.

Next day we able to configure the backup as you can see below. Once it’s configured you can see dash board.

Once it’s done we can see a beautiful dashboard for the backup reports.

If you click on any of the Azure Backup we can see the below screen.

There are multiple backup dashboard available. Mainly storage, Backup Items, Job Health, Job Duration, Alerts

If you click on storage you can see the following screen.

The dashboard related to backup items looks like this

The Job health dashboard will look like this

The Job duration dashboard will look like this

Not only that you can export the data in Excel and play with that as you can see below

Click on export data

By running a filter against the Job Status we can identify the list of failed jobs and we can take necessary actions against the ones which has failed

Not only this, we can share all the backup dashboard with any one you think it’s required.

Also we can directly transfer entire dashboard data into excel including pre-created pivot tables by clicking on the Analyze on Excel Button.

That’s all folks. I hope this post will help the backup administrators to take preventive actions before they really need to know from someone else that the backup has failed.