In the previous articles, we discussed several ways of taking backup and testing the restore process to ensure the integrity of the backup file.

In this article, we're going to discuss the importance of the database backup reporting. This kind of reporting will be designed to eliminate any unnecessary risks that may arise with the safety and security of information. This is the reason, the high-level report; Daily Health Check report will be generated and sent to the SME or to the DBA responsible for IT Infra management.

Database backups are a vital component for most of the database administrators regardless of what backup tool is in place and how the data backup process is all about backing up the data to the disk, to the tape, or to the cloud.

In general, administrators are very much concerned with getting the report daily and also any alerts as per the defined SLAs. Administrators rely on the backup report to understand how the backups are doing and always wanted to safeguard the data.

The other area we will cover is the online backup. It is increasingly becoming the default choice for many small businesses' databases. A database backup report is an important document that reveals the specific piece of information about the status of the data. In general, the generation reports have become a standard practice for any business who values their data.

A backup report should be produced after each backup job has run. The report provides detailed information including what was backed up, what can be restored and information about the backup media. Some of the information provided is specific to each backup type.

The following are the three important parameters that need to be reviewed at regular intervals of time:

1. Backup failure jobs: This is the most important metric to be measured and in most cases, it requires immediate attention and action. For test or dev environments, this could wait for being taking an action based on the SLA.
2. Capacity planning and forecasting: The other report generally circulated every day is the disk space utilization report. Proactive monitoring of storage would prevent most of the backup failures and it helps to forecast the data growth. In turn, this may reduce many unforeseen disk space-related issues.
3. Performance Backup performance is the important metric to measure the overall health of the system. It gives a heads-up for many hidden issues such as hardware resource problems, device driver issues, network throughput problems, software problems, etc.

Further reading: Backup report