Azure Backup: Migrate to Azure Monitor alerts using the template-based portal experience

Published Tuesday, July 19, 2022

Recently, Azure Backup introduced a new and improved alerting solution based on Azure Monitor. The new solution offers multiple benefits such as the:

Ability to configure notifications to a wide range of notification channels
Ability to select which scenarios to get notified for
Ability to manage alerts and notifications programmatically
Ability to have a consistent alerts management experience for multiple Azure services including backup

If you are currently using the older classic alerts solution, it is recommended to move to Azure Monitor alerts. Today, Azure Backup provides a guided experience via Backup center that allows you to switch to built-in Azure Monitor alerts and notifications with just a few clicks.

To switch to Azure Monitor alerts, navigate to Backup center. Here, you will see the count of vaults that have classic alerts enabled. Click on the prompt to take action.

In the next screen, you will see two main steps required to make this move:

1. Setup notifications by creating an alert processing rule & action group: To continue to receive email notifications in a similar manner as classic alerts, you will need to create an alert processing rule (earlier called action rule) which is connected to a notification channel (i.e., action group). Clicking on the Create Rule Button in the below migration screen opens up a template deployment wizard where you only need to enter the subscription, RG and location in which this rule should be created, along with the email ids to which notifications need to be sent. Once these inputs are provided, the template automatically creates all the required resources with the recommended settings without needing any manual intervention.

By default, the template enables email notifications for all Recovery Services vaults in the chosen subscription. If you have multiple subscriptions, you can deploy this template for each of your subscriptions.

Once you are done with this step, all the pre-requisites needed for receiving alerts and notifications via Azure Monitor are complete and you can begin using this solution for all your workloads.

2. Opt-out of classic alerts: To avoid receiving the same alert from two different solutions, it is recommended to disable classic alerts for your vaults. To do so, click on the Manage Alerts button.