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Afi SaaS backup for Microsoft 365: monitoring and reporting

Ingrid Ives
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Afi SaaS backup for Microsoft 365 provides a comprehensive set of features and tools for backup health monitoring and status reporting, including:

  • Overview dashboard providing an eagle eye view for backup and protection status;
  • Activity screen with detailed task history and audit event log;
  • Periodic account status reports sent to email, Slack, or Microsoft Teams;
  • Public API for integration with 3rd party monitoring and analytics tools.

Overview dashboard

Afi Overview dashboard contains a set of widgets reflecting current protection status and recent backup history:

  • the Protection status widget shows an aggregate backup status for the recent 24 hours and how many of the available domain resources have a backup policy (SLA) assigned. Please note that archived resources (for example, suspended users) are not included in protection statistics.
  • the Backup status widget contains per day backup/restore/export tasks history and health status for the recent 7 days.
  • the Data dynamics widget shows backup volume growth trend (how much data and how many emails/files/contacts/calendars are backed up) for the recent 7 days.
  • the Activity widget shows the 10 most recent backup/restore/export tasks together with their statuses.

Screenshot_2022-01-09_at_02.55.52.png

Activity

The Activity screen includes the following tabs with domain tasks history and audit event log:

  • Tasks tab with domain tasks (backup/export/restore/delete) history;
  • Audit tab with audit events related to the domain data access (including backup browse, export, and restore events);
  • Admin tab with audit events related to the account and billing management.

The system keeps task history for 30 days and audit events for 3 years. Both tasks and audit events for a specific period can be downloaded in CSV format.

gsuite-tasks-download.png

Tasks

The Tasks tab shows a time-ordered list of backup/restore/export/delete tasks and contains several filters that simplify searching for the specific actions (for example, in-progress restore or failed backup operations).

The screenshot below shows how to check for failed tasks between the 1st and 8th January:

gsuite-failed-tasks.png

Audit

The Audit tab shows a time-ordered list of security-sensitive user and system actions, including data access (restore/export/delete), account, and billing management events. All audit events contain details about the operation performed, in particular, a list of files/folders/labels selected for export or recovery. One can view audit event details by clicking on the corresponding line in the table.

gsuite-audit-details.png

Periodic status reports

For monitoring purposes, Afi account administrators can enable periodic status reports sent through email, Slack, or Teams notification channels. Supported report frequencies are:

  • daily (sent each day at 00:00 UTC);
  • weekly (sent each Monday at 00:00 UTC);
  • monthly (sent on the 1st day of a month).

afi-reports.png

Email

You can configure status reports to be sent to one or more email addresses and check the configuration by clicking on the Test button to send a test report. Please note that it may take up to 1-2 minutes for a test report to be delivered. If you haven't received a test report in a few minutes, please check a Spam folder.

Slack

To enable Slack reports, please create a Slack channel for Afi reports, configure a Slack application with incoming webhook as described here and add the webhook URL to Afi report configuration.

Correct Slack webhook URL should look like this:

https://hooks.slack.com/services/T00000000/B00000000/XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Teams

To enable Teams reports, please create a Teams channel for Afi reports, configure a connector with incoming webhook as described here and add the webhook URL to Afi report configuration.

Correct Teams webhook URL should look like this:

https://<domain-name>.webhook.office.com/webhookb2/0cb595d2-94a5-4c29-82aa-2122b76d57ce@799fbde3-b941-46b1-bc0f-7cc706db8dab/IncomingWebhook/be26f16eb8af4c5eb99911eeb793cd1f/9827fd76-a7cc-4f76-aea0-d148ac3827d0

Public API for reporting

You can use Afi Public API to build custom integrations with the Afi service, for example, a monitoring application to get account backup and billing status. Another API use-case is to query audit events history and then push this data to your corporate SIEM or BI system for further analysis. You can learn more about the AFI API in the following guide.

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