Alerts and notifications in Backup Exec
An alert is any event or condition in Backup Exec that is important enough to display a message or require a response from you. Backup Exec includes many alert categories and four alert types. Alert categories are the events or the conditions that cause alerts. Alert categories encompass many circumstances or problems that affect the system, jobs, media, or storage sources. Each alert category can include one or more events that generate an alert. For example, a Job Failed error may occur for many reasons. The alert severity levels can help you to determine which alerts need immediate attention and which alerts require a response.
The following alert severity levels are used in Backup Exec:
Related information
Table: Alert severity
| Item | Description |
|---|---|
| Attention required | Indicates the issues that require a response before the job or operation can continue. |
| Error | Indicates the issues that affect job processing or the integrity of your backup. These alerts cannot be disabled and cannot be configured to be cleared automatically. You must respond to them manually. |
| Warning | Indicates the conditions that may or may not cause jobs to fail. You should monitor the conditions and take actions to resolve them. |
| Informational | Provides status messages for the conditions that you might want to know about. |
By default, most alerts are enabled, which means that they appear in the Active Alerts pane when they occur. You can disable warning alerts and informational alerts by editing alert category properties. However, error alerts and attention required alerts cannot be disabled. You can filter the alerts so that only specific alerts appear.
From the Home tab, you can view all active alerts or filter the alerts to view only specific alert severities or only the alerts that occurred on certain dates. On the Backup and Restore tab, when you double-click a server, you can see the active alerts that are specific to that server. Similarly, on the Storage tab, when you double-click a type of storage, you can see the active alerts that are specific to that storage device.
Alerts remain in the Active Alerts pane until they receive a response. You can respond to an alert manually or you can configure Backup Exec to respond to some alerts automatically after a specified length of time. Depending on the alert severity, a response might not be required, such as with informational alerts. After you respond to an alert, Backup Exec moves it to the alert history. Alert history is available on the Home tab, the Backup and Restore tab, and the Storage tab. In addition, an Alert History report is available from the Reports tab.
See Alert History report.
You can configure notifications to inform recipients when alerts occur. For example, you can notify a backup administrator by email or cell phone text message when a critical alert occurs.
To assist with hardware troubleshooting, Backup Exec displays alerts for SCSI event ID 9 (storage timeout), ID 11 (controller error), and ID 15 (storage not ready).