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borgmatic/docs/how-to/monitor-your-backups.md

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How to monitor your backups

Monitoring and alerting

Having backups is great, but they won't do you a lot of good unless you have confidence that they're running on a regular basis. That's where monitoring and alerting comes in.

There are several different ways you can monitor your backups and find out whether they're succeeding. Which of these you choose to do is up to you and your particular infrastructure:

  1. Job runner alerts: The easiest place to start is with failure alerts from the scheduled job runner (cron, systemd, etc.) that's running borgmatic. But note that if the job doesn't even get scheduled (e.g. due to the job runner not running), you probably won't get an alert at all! Still, this is a decent first line of defense, especially when combined with some of the other approaches below.
  2. borgmatic error hooks: The on_error hook allows you to run an arbitrary command or script when borgmatic itself encounters an error running your backups. So for instance, you can run a script to send yourself a text message alert. But note that if borgmatic doesn't actually run, this alert won't fire. See error hooks below for how to configure this.
  3. borgmatic monitoring hooks: This feature integrates with monitoring services like Healthchecks, Cronitor, Cronhub, and PagerDuty and pings these services whenever borgmatic runs. That way, you'll receive an alert when something goes wrong or (for certain hooks) the service doesn't hear from borgmatic for a configured interval. See Healthchecks hook, Cronitor hook, Cronhub hook, and PagerDuty hook below for how to configure this.
  4. Third-party monitoring software: You can use traditional monitoring software to consume borgmatic JSON output and track when the last successful backup occurred. See scripting borgmatic and related software below for how to configure this.
  5. Borg hosting providers: Most Borg hosting providers include monitoring and alerting as part of their offering. This gives you a dashboard to check on all of your backups, and can alert you if the service doesn't hear from borgmatic for a configured interval.
  6. borgmatic consistency checks: While not strictly part of monitoring, if you really want confidence that your backups are not only running but are restorable as well, you can configure particular consistency checks or even script full extract tests.

Error hooks

When an error occurs during a prune, create, or check action, borgmatic can run configurable shell commands to fire off custom error notifications or take other actions, so you can get alerted as soon as something goes wrong. Here's a not-so-useful example:

hooks:
    on_error:
        - echo "Error while creating a backup or running a backup hook."

The on_error hook supports interpolating particular runtime variables into the hook command. Here's an example that assumes you provide a separate shell script to handle the alerting:

hooks:
    on_error:
        - send-text-message.sh "{configuration_filename}" "{repository}"

In this example, when the error occurs, borgmatic interpolates a few runtime values into the hook command: the borgmatic configuration filename, and the path of the repository. Here's the full set of supported variables you can use here:

  • configuration_filename: borgmatic configuration filename in which the error occurred
  • repository: path of the repository in which the error occurred (may be blank if the error occurs in a hook)
  • error: the error message itself
  • output: output of the command that failed (may be blank if an error occurred without running a command)

Note that borgmatic runs the on_error hooks only for prune, create, or check actions or hooks in which an error occurs, and not other actions. borgmatic does not run on_error hooks if an error occurs within a before_everything or after_everything hook. For more about hooks, see the borgmatic hooks documentation, especially the security information.

Healthchecks hook

Healthchecks is a service that provides "instant alerts when your cron jobs fail silently", and borgmatic has built-in integration with it. Once you create a Healthchecks account and project on their site, all you need to do is configure borgmatic with the unique "Ping URL" for your project. Here's an example:

hooks:
    healthchecks: https://hc-ping.com/addffa72-da17-40ae-be9c-ff591afb942a

With this hook in place, borgmatic pings your Healthchecks project when a backup begins, ends, or errors. Specifically, after the before_backup hooks run, borgmatic lets Healthchecks know that it has started if any of the prune, create, or check actions are run.

Then, if the actions complete successfully, borgmatic notifies Healthchecks of the success after the after_backup hooks run, and includes borgmatic logs in the payload data sent to Healthchecks. This means that borgmatic logs show up in the Healthchecks UI, although be aware that Healthchecks currently has a 10-kilobyte limit for the logs in each ping.

If an error occurs during any action or hook, borgmatic notifies Healthchecks after the on_error hooks run, also tacking on logs including the error itself. But the logs are only included for errors that occur when a prune, create, or check action is run.

You can customize the verbosity of the logs that are sent to Healthchecks with borgmatic's --monitoring-verbosity flag. The --files and --stats flags may also be of use. See borgmatic --help for more information.

You can configure Healthchecks to notify you by a variety of mechanisms when backups fail or it doesn't hear from borgmatic for a certain period of time.

Cronitor hook

Cronitor provides "Cron monitoring and uptime healthchecks for websites, services and APIs", and borgmatic has built-in integration with it. Once you create a Cronitor account and cron job monitor on their site, all you need to do is configure borgmatic with the unique "Ping API URL" for your monitor. Here's an example:

hooks:
    cronitor: https://cronitor.link/d3x0c1

With this hook in place, borgmatic pings your Cronitor monitor when a backup begins, ends, or errors. Specifically, after the before_backup hooks run, borgmatic lets Cronitor know that it has started if any of the prune, create, or check actions are run. Then, if the actions complete successfully, borgmatic notifies Cronitor of the success after the after_backup hooks run. And if an error occurs during any action or hook, borgmatic notifies Cronitor after the on_error hooks run.

You can configure Cronitor to notify you by a variety of mechanisms when backups fail or it doesn't hear from borgmatic for a certain period of time.

Cronhub hook

Cronhub provides "instant alerts when any of your background jobs fail silently or run longer than expected", and borgmatic has built-in integration with it. Once you create a Cronhub account and monitor on their site, all you need to do is configure borgmatic with the unique "Ping URL" for your monitor. Here's an example:

hooks:
    cronhub: https://cronhub.io/start/1f5e3410-254c-11e8-b61d-55875966d031

With this hook in place, borgmatic pings your Cronhub monitor when a backup begins, ends, or errors. Specifically, after the before_backup hooks run, borgmatic lets Cronhub know that it has started if any of the prune, create, or check actions are run. Then, if the actions complete successfully, borgmatic notifies Cronhub of the success after the after_backup hooks run. And if an error occurs during any action or hook, borgmatic notifies Cronhub after the on_error hooks run.

Note that even though you configure borgmatic with the "start" variant of the ping URL, borgmatic substitutes the correct state into the URL when pinging Cronhub ("start", "finish", or "fail").

You can configure Cronhub to notify you by a variety of mechanisms when backups fail or it doesn't hear from borgmatic for a certain period of time.

PagerDuty hook

In case you're new here: borgmatic is simple, configuration-driven backup software for servers and workstations, powered by Borg Backup.

PagerDuty provides incident monitoring and alerting. borgmatic has built-in integration that can notify you via PagerDuty as soon as a backup fails, so you can make sure your backups keep working.

First, create a PagerDuty account and service on their site. On the service, add an integration and set the Integration Type to "borgmatic".

Then, configure borgmatic with the unique "Integration Key" for your service. Here's an example:

hooks:
    pagerduty: a177cad45bd374409f78906a810a3074

With this hook in place, borgmatic creates a PagerDuty event for your service whenever backups fail. Specifically, if an error occurs during a create, prune, or check action, borgmatic sends an event to PagerDuty before the on_error hooks run. Note that borgmatic does not contact PagerDuty when a backup starts or ends without error.

You can configure PagerDuty to notify you by a variety of mechanisms when backups fail.

If you have any issues with the integration, please contact us.

Scripting borgmatic

To consume the output of borgmatic in other software, you can include an optional --json flag with create, list, or info to get the output formatted as JSON.

Note that when you specify the --json flag, Borg's other non-JSON output is suppressed so as not to interfere with the captured JSON. Also note that JSON output only shows up at the console, and not in syslog.

Related software

Successful backups

borgmatic list includes support for a --successful flag that only lists successful (non-checkpoint) backups. This flag works via a basic heuristic: It assumes that non-checkpoint archive names end with a digit (e.g. from a timestamp), while checkpoint archive names do not. This means that if you're using custom archive names that do not end in a digit, the --successful flag will not work as expected.

Combined with a built-in Borg flag like --last, you can list the last successful backup for use in your monitoring scripts. Here's an example combined with --json:

borgmatic list --successful --last 1 --json

Note that this particular combination will only work if you've got a single backup "series" in your repository. If you're instead backing up, say, from multiple different hosts into a single repository, then you'll need to get fancier with your archive listing. See borg list --help for more flags.

Latest backups

All borgmatic actions that accept an "--archive" flag allow you to specify an archive name of "latest". This lets you get the latest successful archive without having to first run "borgmatic list" manually, which can be handy in automated scripts. Here's an example:

borgmatic info --archive latest

Related documentation