A backup schedule that's silently been failing for weeks is worse than no backup plan at all, because you think you're protected when you're not. Checking status regularly closes that gap.

How to Check Backup Job Status

1. In the Azure portal, open the Recovery Services vault.
2. Click Backup jobs in the left-hand menu to see a history of every backup, restore, and configuration job, along with its status (Completed, Failed, In progress, or Completed with warnings).
3. Click into any failed job to see the specific error and a link to Microsoft's troubleshooting guidance for that error code.

How to Set Up Alerts

1. In the vault, go to Backup Alerts (or Monitoring > Alerts, depending on portal version).
2. Configure built-in backup alerts to notify you by email for job failures.
3. For more control, create an Alert rule under Monitoring > Alerts at the vault level, choose the condition (e.g. backup job failed), and add an Action group with the email addresses or other notification methods that should be notified.

Common Questions

How often should we actually check this?

With email alerts configured, you don't need to manually check daily — but it's still worth a monthly review of the Backup jobs history to catch anything alerts might have missed, and to periodically test an actual restore (see our VM restore guide).

What's the most common reason a backup job fails?

Frequently it's a VM that was stopped/deallocated at the scheduled backup time, a network connectivity issue for on-premises MARS agent backups, or a change to the VM's disk configuration that the backup policy needs to be updated for.