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Microsoft Issues Preview of Azure Backup Explorer

Microsoft's Backup Explorer tool for Azure, which is designed to monitor backups across an organization's "estate," is now available as a preview, Microsoft announced on Wednesday.

Microsoft has broad plans for the tool. For instance, Microsoft is aiming to monitor backups across Azure "subscriptions, regions and tenants." Right now, Backup Explorer is just available for use with Azure virtual machine backups, although support for other Azure workloads is planned and "will be added soon."

Backup Explorer is built using Azure Monitor Workbook, which brings text, metrics, parameters and queries together into reports. It's also integrated with the Azure Resource Graph, which lets users execute queries from the Azure Portal. The overall idea with Backup Explorer is to have a single view of the state of backups across Azure workloads.

"Backup Explorer is a built-in Azure Monitor Workbook enabling you to have a single pane of glass for performing real-time monitoring across your entire backup estate on Azure," the announcement explained.

Backup Explorer provides an "aggregated view" of backups. It's not "limited to a Recovery Services vault" perspective, Microsoft explained. Consequently, it'll even show the Azure "resources that are not configured for backup."

MSPs that use Azure Lighthouse to oversee Azure services for their customers can use Backup Explorer to show backup information across tenancies, Microsoft indicated. Report data can be exported to Excel spreadsheets, if wanted, or views can be pinned to the Azure Portal dashboard.

Users can drill down into specific details with Backup Explorer, and can even access the virtual machines where there may be backup issues to resolve.

"The at-scale views and deep drill-downs are designed to aid you in getting to the root cause of a backup-related issue," the announcement explained. "Once you identify an issue, you can act on it by seamlessly navigating to the backup item or the Azure resource, right from Backup Explorer."

The Backup Explorer preview has some limitations. Users can only see virtual machine backup information over the past seven days at maximum. It's not possible to customize Backup Explorer templates either, according to this Microsoft Backup Explorer document.

About the Author

Kurt Mackie is senior news producer for 1105 Media's Converge360 group.

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