Monitoring activity

While Alcion doesn't require active day-to-day management, it's still important that Alcion administrators can get relevant information about key activity in the system when they need it. Alcion offers several capabilities to address this need.

Recent activity and statistics

The Alcion home page is a handy dashboard that provides a single pane of glass to review key operational parameters. These include statistics about the number of resources discovered and how they're protected as well as quick view into recent backup and restore actions.

Additionally, for each resource type and individual resources, Alcion also displays the total logical size, count, and breakdown by type of all available and recent backup data. These statistics help understand the overall data at risk and velocity of change for each resource.

Compliance score

Alcion calculates a compliance score to show the level of protection for each of the supported resources types. The score indicates that a protection policy is assigned to resources and that there has been at least 1 successful backup in the last 24 hours.

The calculation will ignore resources that have a backup policy set to Excluded.

Resource data activity insights

In addition to tracking backup related activity, Alcion also provides visibility into the overall data velocity for the underlying Microsoft 365 resources, even when no backups are enabled.

Higher data activity score indicates that there are recent changes to the underlying resource. To minimize the risk of data loss, Alcion recommends that resources with high activity are protected with backups.

Activity

When the quick activity summary isn't sufficient, Alcion offers a complete view of all historical and in-progress operations. Administrators are able to view the status and details of any backup, restore, export, or deletion request operation as well as any backup policy change operation. The Activity page comes with a few predefined commonly used filters as well as the ability to filter based on custom criteria.

For more in depth analysis, up to 30 days of activity can be exported. The export is based on the currently set filters. The time range filter will be adjusted to the most recent 30 days of actual activity if the time range filter isn't specified or if the time range is more permissive than 30 days.

Backups completing with exceptions

On rare occasions, Alcion may run into external issues that make it impossible to successfully protect a small number of items in a large backup. Some common reasons are transient Microsoft API unavailability, corrupted or inaccessible items in the customer Microsoft 365 tenant, access restriction overrides, etc. When only a few items are affected, instead of failing the backup completely, Alcion will complete it with status Completed (with exceptions) and will include details about the failed items in the corresponding action on the Activity page. The successfully completed items from such backups will be available for restores.

Any failed items will be retied on subsequent backups. Additionally, the Alcion operations team will investigate the failures and will notify affected parties if any action may be required on their end.

Notifications

To further minimize the operational burden, Alcion also provides notification email alerts about key events to administrators so that they can stay informed without the need to constantly login to the product.

By default, notification alerts are sent to the email of the primary admin that initially created the Alcion account. This email can be customized during account onboarding or at any point afterwards from Settings.

Currently Alcion will send emails for the following:

• First successful backup
• Backup failures
• Daily account activity summary
• Daily partner activity summary
• Restore failures
• Restore successful completions
• Backup deletion requested
• Export failures
• Export successful completions
• Activity export completions
• Potential ransomware activity detected
• Malware found and eliminated
• Monthly annual subscription usage report
• Account notification preferences email changed