We’ve been rolling out the free version of Veeam Endpoint Backup to staff computers slowly for about a year now to replace other paid and free applications. At first, Endpoint had no built-in way to send email notifications on backup job status. But with the release of version 1.5 notifications are now a baked in feature. The issue with email notifications is that, like many products with this feature, only one person / email address can receive the messages. However, we can work around this by introducing other free products / services into the workflow.
We start by setting the email notifications to go to a free CheckCentral account, a Binary Fortress product that filters incoming email based on user defined rules that look at the subject line of incoming emails. CheckCentral supplies a custom email address to plug into apps such as Veeam for this purpose, and also provides an smtp server (mail.checkcentral.cc, port 587) to utilize for delivery. CheckCentral has some nice features such as a quick view dashboard, an activity page to see and filter all inbound messages, and up to five checks on the free package. So at this point, we’ve routed the Veeam Endpoint emails (success, warning, and failures) to CheckCentral where anyone with access to the account can view the status, but let’s extend things further!
Next, Veeam Endpoint messages that contain either [Failure] or [Warning] in the subject line are in turn relayed from CheckCentral to another email address, this time a custom address created in Slack. We are using the free for non-profit Slack version which provides the same features as the Standard priced tier including custom email integrations. The emails sent to the custom Slack email address go into a predetermined channel (#backups). As other team members have access to Slack, they in turn can receive any notifications and act upon them if necessary!
(FYI: Slack partners with TechSoup for review and validation of charity status. )
Combined with CheckCentral and Slack, Veeam Endpoint is a really nice option for low / no cost backup monitoring. We’ve also offloaded other notifications into Slack for increased consolidation including:
- Veeam Backup and Recovery for Hyper-V
- Antivirus console notifications (Vipre)
- Various Linux server cron jobs
- Archive server (FreeNAS) status emails
- Network uptime monitoring (via Uptime Robot)
- ScreenConnect unattended session messages
- UPS / Battery backup notifications
- WordPress vulnerability updates (via WPSCAN / Securi)
All of those wonderful notifications now consolidated under one roof (and no longer in my inbox)!
