Monitoring with PowerShell: Monitoring Acronis Backups

Intro

This is a monitoring script requested via Reddit, One of the reddit r/msp users wondered how they can monitor Acronis a little bit easier. I jumped on this because it happened pretty much at the same time that I was asked to speak at the Acronis CyberSummit so it kinda made sense to script this so I have something to demonstrate at my session there.

There’s a lot of approaches you can take with monitoring backups. I’ve seen people monitor event logs and specific files but I always recommend to check if a vendor has local tooling available to help you with this. Most of the products these days have a command-line utility to use for just this.

You can find monitoring scripts for other backups product here.

Backups monitoring script

For the backup monitoring script we’re making use of the Acronis command line utility called Acrocmd. Acrocmd allows you to create a raw report which is a tab delimited format, this is useful because PowerShell can easily convert that to an object.

 1
 2
 3
 4
 5
 6
 7
 8
 9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23


try {
    $Activities = & "C:\Program Files\BackupClient\CommandLineTool\acrocmd.exe" list activities --output raw  | ConvertFrom-Csv -Delimiter "`t" -Header 'Name', 'Machine', 'State', 'Progress', 'Start', 'Elapsed', 'estimated', 'GUID', 'Resource','Result' | Where-Object { $_.Name -NE "The operation completed successfully." }
}
catch {
    write-host "Error, could not retrieve backup settings and tasks"
}
$template = 'dd.MM.yyyy HH:mm:ss'

$TasksExecutedInLastWeek = $Activities | Where-Object { [DateTime]::ParseExact($_.'start', $template, $null) -gt (Get-Date).adddays('-7') }

if (!$TasksExecutedInLastWeek) {
    Write-Host "This device has not had any backup job for 1 week."
}
foreach ($Task in $TasksExecutedInLastWeek) {
    if ($Task.state -eq "running" -and [datetime]$task.elapsed -gt [datetime]"23:59:00") {
        Write-Host "This device has been running a backup for over 24 hours."
    }
}

$FailedJobs = $TasksExecutedInLastWeek | Where-Object -Property 'Result' -ne 'succeeded'
if($FailedJobs.length -ge $MaximumFailedBackupsPerWeek){
    Write-Host "This device has failed more backups than allowed."
}

Now this isn’t the only thing you’ll want to monitor. There’s also the case if a device has even received its backup plan, and if that backup plan is really active on the device;

 1
 2
 3
 4
 5
 6
 7
 8
 9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19



try {
    $Plans = & "C:\Program Files\BackupClient\CommandLineTool\acrocmd.exe" list plans --output raw | ConvertFrom-Csv -Delimiter "`t" -Header 'Name', 'State', 'Status', 'Last Start', 'User', 'GUID', 'Next Start', 'Enabled' | Where-Object -Property Name -NE "The operation completed successfully."
}
catch {
    write-host "Error, could not retrieve backup settings and tasks"
}

if(!$Plans){
     write-host "No backup plan found. This device needs a backup plan assigned."
}

if ($plans.status -ne "OK") {
    write-host "The backup plan is in a failed state. Please check why."
}

if ($plans.status.enabled -ne "true") {
   write-host "The backup plan is disabled."
}

And that’s it! a pretty straight forward approach using the vendors supplied commandline tool. I hope you enjoyed this and as always, Happy PowerShelling.