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Email reports or API connectors?
Backup monitoring gets its results one of two ways: it reads the report emails your backup software already sends, or it logs in to each product's API. BackupSentinel reads the emails. Here is what each approach needs from you, what it sees, and where each one falls short.
The two approaches, side by side.
Neither is better at everything. The difference is what you hand over and what you get back.
| Topic | Report emails (BackupSentinel) | API connectors |
|---|---|---|
| What you set up | A report address in each backup product's notification settings. Minutes per product, nothing to install. | An account or API key per backup server or console, and a network path to it or an agent installed beside it. |
| Access to your backup systems | None. The monitoring only receives what the backup software sends, so it holds no login to your backup servers. | Stored credentials for every server or console it reads. Whoever gets into the monitoring tool can reach them. |
| Products covered | Anything that sends a report email: built-in rules for the common products, a generic rule, and your own rules for the rest. | The products that have a connector, in the versions it supports. |
| When the product changes | If a report's wording changes, the email waits in the Inbox instead of disappearing, and you adjust the rule. | If the vendor's API changes, you wait for the connector to be updated. |
| A backup that stops running | Each job knows when its next report is due. One that does not arrive turns Missing and opens an alert. | The connector sees no new session the next time it polls, if the tool checks for that. |
| What it can see | What the report says: the result, the job, errors and warnings, and usually the size and run time. | Also what the report leaves out: settings such as retention and encryption, restores, repository capacity. |
| Machines with no backup at all | Only devices you have recorded, or that a backup's details created. A server that never sends a report is unknown. | Can list the machines in the backup console's inventory that no backup policy covers. |
What keeps email monitoring dependable.
The usual objection to email is that a report can go missing or be misread without anyone noticing. Each of those cases has its own answer in BackupSentinel.
- A report that never comes
- Every job has an expected interval. When its report is overdue past a grace window, the job turns Missing and an alert opens, like a failure. Missing reports
- A report no rule can read
- It is kept in the Inbox, never dropped. Fix the rule, or write one from that email, and read it again. Parsing rules and Inbox
- A product with its own wording
- 12 products have built-in rules. For anything else, write a rule and test it on a real email before it reads the next one.
- Something that does not send email
- A script can report a run with one HTTP request to the report API. Report API
When an API connector is the better choice.
A report email describes a backup run. If what you need is in the backup system rather than in its reports, a connector-based tool will see more than BackupSentinel does:
- Discovering every VM, endpoint or Microsoft 365 user in a console, including the ones no policy protects.
- Auditing settings inside the backup software: retention, encryption, immutable and offsite copies. BackupSentinel marks these Unknown.
- Restore history and repository free space, which most report emails do not contain.
When report emails fit better
- No credentials to hand over. Nothing outside your network logs in to your backup servers.
- Every product in one place, including the ones no connector supports, and devices like a NAS that only send email.
- Nothing to install or keep updated beside each backup server.
- Devices you do record are covered: the Protection coverage report lists the ones with no monitored backup or no recent good result.
Try it on your own reports.
The quickest way to judge is to point one backup’s report at a client address and look at what BackupSentinel makes of it. The trial needs no card.
Start with the reports you already get.
Create a client, copy its address into the backup software, and the next report starts monitoring. The trial runs 30 days with no card.