Alerts on the age of the most recent NCM backup?

You can configure NCM to send you an e-mail each time a backup job fails.  Your task then becomes to open the e-mail every time it's sent to you, and then troubleshoot the error.  If NCM fails to backup your ASA even once, you'd have an alert, and know you have something on your to-do list.

From my NCM alert e-mails:

+++++++++++++++(e-mail begins)+++++++++++++++++++++

  SolarWinds
Network Configuration Manager

  Scheduled Job
Notification

___________________________________________________________________________

  Job Engine:
SolarWindsServer

  9/27/2016
10:00:03 AM : Started  running-config Backup Job :
JobDescription_(long cryptic name)

  Download Configs
from Devices

  149 devices
selected

  Devices : 149

  Errors  : 4

(Device name and IP address):

ERROR: Cannot download running-config :
Connection Refused by (IP address of node)

(List of failed devices' names and their IP addresses appears below, as well as successfully completed nodes.)

+++++++++++++++++++++++(e-mailed alert ends)++++++++++++++++++++

To set this up, or to verify you have it configured correctly for notifications of NCM backup job failures:

Find the job that does your running-config backup.

In the "Enter Notification Details" tab:

Verify you have the circled items selected and filled in with the correct information:

In the "Add Job Specific Details" section, choose the config type and add any notifications you want:

Review the job.  Verify your nodes are selected, notification is enabled, and Click Finish.

You should now receive an e-mail every time the job runs and one or more nodes fails to backup successfully.  The only thing left is for you to follow through and troubleshoot every time a node backup fails.

If you worry that you might not have received the information you need, you can run a report to show the status of all devices' config backup.  Just open "All Reports" and search for "backup".

Select the report you wish to view and run it.

The far right column lists the last successful running config of every device:

It's easy to export to Excel and sort on the last column, or simply scroll down through the list and see any devices that were not backed up recently.

*facepalm* i forgot about that setting, and over thought the solution again thanks for the help!

Thank you for this post almost made my own for something similar. Looking for a way to have in the default report NCM has for nightly backups to have the last successful so I can have a better idea of new issues rather than known ones. Not sure it's possible yet and think that would take tinkering with things I shouldn't yet.

There are some alternate options, if you don't want to rely solely on the process I provided initially.

1.  Go to your NPM My Dashboards > Configs > Config Summary.  It should already be configured for some useful information, but you can customize the page to what you don't see present already.

Here's mine:   The image in the upper left makes seeing what's not backed up very simple.

I've found that image so useful that I added it to NPM's front page default fiew, along with the other things I find most useful:

But I still rely on those daily reports in my e-mail to see which devices did NOT backup last night.

2.  There are at least two Reports available that can tell you the status of any device's backup for Startup-config and Running-config:

When you run them, you'll see that last time each device was successfully backed up:

Better still, you can use this report in a schedule, adjust it to only show those devices that haven't been backed up in X Days, e-mail it regularly / automatically to anyone you need on a scheduled basis, and even export it to Excel or PDF.  Once I have it in Excel I sort by the last Running Backup date column and see if anything's out of line.

3.  Make your own reports with NPM's Web-based Report Builder, or with the on-server Report-Writer application.

Here's hoping one of these is right for you!

I wasn't able to find that report until your post.(Was trying to go in and do the query digging in the database). I actually copied it and edited that report so the oldest dates are at the top. That way it is at the top of the report when it hits my email. The config summary page stuff is awesome too. Mine is looking much better with your additions. Here is the screenshots showing what I meant by changing the order:

Then the setting change:

Thank you again for the assistance, it is very much appreciated. Should have come to thwack first would have saved me sometime.

I'm glad I was able to help.  Thanks for the response, and for showing your process and methods.  Others will benefit from your sharing.

Swift Packets!

Rick Schroeder

Hi, I've been trying to work out a way of setting up an alert so that instead of sending an email to the team, it sends an SNMP trap to our Netcool system, which in terms auto generates an incident ticket.  I've spent a few hours trying to work find the correct fields to use for the tigger conditions, and also the alert action text.

Cheers,

Phil

Found this post in the hunt for a good solution on how to create normal orion alerts when backup in NCM fails. I was not satisfied with the solution with reports, wanted a proper alert. So I created on.

Below script looks at when last backup job was done, taking into account if the config was unchanged and backup file was not saved. It also checks if the node is up. In the query you can change how old the backup may be. For me it's ok if it misses one backup job but not two.

So, create a custom SWQL alert with "Node" as target:

Paste in the below code: (observe that some code is "hard coded" in the alert and cant be changed)

INNER JOIN Cirrus.Nodes AS NCM ON Nodes.Nodeid=NCM.CoreNodeID
INNER JOIN 
(
SELECT 
    CA.NodeID AS NodeID, 
    MAX(CA.AttemptedDownloadTime) as LastBackup
FROM Cirrus.ConfigArchive AS CA
GROUP BY CA.NodeID
HAVING MAX(CA.AttemptedDownloadTime)<ADDDAY(-2,GETDATE()) -- Adjust how old backups that are ok
) AS A ON NCM.NodeID=A.Nodeid

WHERE NCM.Status=1 

Good luck!