Duplicati-monitoring.com - central monitoring of multiple Duplicati instances + nice email reports

Hi

Excellent service. Just wondering is there any plans to archive remove/reports reports by bulk rather then one at a time.

Have about 6 months for several backups where there is no need for me to retain them.

Maybe a setting delete after x days in the profile/report section

Ger

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This is an awesome service, thank you! There is one feature, however, that I assumed it had that I just realized it doesn’t…would it be possible to make it email me when an expected backup never arrived? My backup server crashed 2 weeks ago, and I had no idea until I just happened to think “hmm I don’t think I’ve gotten a backup success email in a while”…

It does!? That is more or less the core feature.

Duplicati monitoring considers the state of a backup set as successful if a recent successful backup was reported. If no further backup reports come in (or only error or warning reports come in) the state will switch to warning after some time and later to error.
When this happens depends on the backup schedule you configure in duplicati monitoring. Say you configure a backup to run daily in duplicati monitoring. Then, if no backup report has arrived for (a little more than*) 1 day, it will move into warning state and after 2 days*, it will move to error state.

*There is a little more complicated magic involved that takes the usual backup duration into account and so on, but you get the idea.

You can configure the interval in duplicati monitoring longer than in Duplicati. Lets say you configure a backup to run daily in Duplicati and weekly in Duplicati monitoring. This way, Duplicati monitoring will only complain once no successful backup report has been received for a full week. This may be useful for devices like laptops which may not be connected to the Internet all the time or which produce warning backups from time to time and you don’t care.
So the interval which you configure in Duplicati monitoring is the interval in which it expects backup reports to arrive. No problem if in reality, reports arrive more often, it won’t complain.

You can configure for which states you want to get emailed in the “contacts” section. If you configure to only get notified about errors and warnings, you will only get emails if there is no recent successful backup for some backup set.
Furthermore, the subject of the reports clearly indicates whether there is a problem or not. So you can also use a filter in your email program to filter away the successful reports and only keep warning and error reports in your inbox.

Hmm, ok…is that what “daily reports” is then I guess? I didn’t really care to get daily summary reports, since my backups are weekly that’s just a lot of noise…I assumed any contacts who did not have “daily reports” enabled would just get notified when something is wrong. I guess I misunderstood. What is the use-case for contacts which have “daily reports” disabled? I don’t understand what functionality they provide…at any rate I will enable “daily reports” and see if it does what I want. Thanks! :slight_smile:

Ah okay, I understand. Yeah, you need to turn on daily reports if you want to get emails. If daily is too much noise, you can set the level to warnings and errors. Thus, you will only get daily emails when something is wrong, so it won’t be too much noise in the normal case, at least.

Maybe we should introduce something like weekly reports. Does anyone else would like this?

One contact is necessary for login. This contact makes sense to have reports disabled if you just want to use the web dashboard or you want to receive reports at another address than the login address.
For further contacts, you could argue whether it makes sense or not to have contacts with email reports disabled. In some cases it may be useful. For example, you can disable email reports for a contact temporarily, e.g. when an employee is on holiday. Deleting and recreating it later would require that you run through the email confirmation process again, whereas disabling does not.
Also the idea was that we may in the future add more types of reports and there should be a way to enable/disable each individually.

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Hello,

I’ve been seeing these warnings intermittently this past week on my systems:

[Warning-Duplicati.Library.Modules.Builtin.SendHttpMessage-HttpResponseError]: HTTP Response: 503 - Service Unavailable

Thank you for providing this service!

@drwtsn32 Did you see these warnings regularly or just once or twice? I know we have had some overload periods, mostly around 22:00 to 23:00 CET. We are working on this and it should already be a lot better now. We currently have around 1.500 users and receive around 10.000 backup reports daily. As hosting is financed through donations only, we cannot afford a cloud provider that scales to whatever it takes… But we are working on performance improvements, so we can serve more users with our server.

Sorry for any inconveniences. And thank you for reporting any problems that you encounter.

I already deleted most of the warning emails, but two of them occurred:

2020-03-24 22:00:18 PDT (-7)
2020-03-24 18:00:18 PDT (-7)

Totally understand about you being supported by donation only. I have donated in the past, perhaps it’s time to donate again.

Another idea - make the solution open source so we can host our own?

I’ve been getting 408 errors myself :

  • Apr 10, 2020 10:31 AM: Failed to send message: System.Net.WebException: The remote server returned an error: (408) Request Timeout.
  • Apr 10, 2020 10:31 AM: HTTP Response: 408 - Request Timeout:
    Timeout

Request Timeout

Server timeout waiting for the HTTP request from the client.

More information on the problem here. How should I investigate these.

@crazy4chrissi I have a small feature request.

The default number of backup-sets per page is 20. There are more than 30 backup jobs that I monitor using duplicati-monitoring.com and I prefer to show them all in one list. Every time I log on to duplicati-monitoring.com, I have to click the drop-down menu and choose “200 rows per page”.

Can you store the selected number of rows automatically after selecting 20, 50, 100 or 200 rows or add an option at the Profile page to set the preferred number of rows per page?

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Hello, I really like what you did with duplicati-monitoring, great piece of code! Just one question : how can I easily delete older reports? I have 8 backups a day, so almost 3000 reports a year. Even with 200 reports per page, its already 15 pages of reports. After more than 2 years it will be impossible to display in the GUI.
Can we easily have a setup to delete automatically backups older than x days / weeks / months ? Or just to keep the last x reports? Thank you beforehand for a reply and keep up the good work with this tool!

Could be a good idea to have an option to purge older reports. What’s really important are the recent reports, like a couple of weeks or months

That would be the next big thing to introduce in my opinion as well.

@Fabian_Michel Thanks for your feedback. Currently, we are manually deleting last years reports around April of each year. So you will have at least ~ 3 months and at most ~ 15 months of reports. We have a couple of “power users”, one already received more than 100.000 backup reports in 2020. The GUI can handle this amount of data, no problem.

Of course manually deleting is not a perfect option, but viable. More advanced options are already planned.

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Thanks for taking the time to reply, clear answer, much appreciated!

Hey guys… just wanted to let you know that duplicati and the duplicati-monitoring service are getting me very close to the old Crashplan experience that used with my family for at least 10 years before it was put to the grave. Thanks for your work.

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Hi first of all great service. Is there any tutorial or help how to add “Webinterface” for the PC not located locally, for the PC on the remote location?
Tnx

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Thank you very much for this great service. I’ve already donated :smiley:
Also I have a request/need: in the Backup Reports screen there are several columns: Time of report, Backup set, New data, Modified data, Duration and Result.
I miss an important one: Group
I use groups to separate each computer’s backups, and as some of them may have backups with similar name, I’d love to see “Group” column so I can guest what “Documents” backup is that one.
Big thanks!

Hi all,

Thank you so much for this service. I have 2 small VPS that I use to back. I have a weird problem that nearly almost every 2 days, some backups are marked as errors but when I review the report it is marked as a success

This is a common misunderstanding. Duplicati monitoring does not simply check that the last report was successful. It checks that a sucessfull report was received recently. What recently means is based on the interval that you configure in duplicati monitoring.

In your screenshot, the last backup report was a successful report. But duplicati monitoring considers the freshness of the backup. In your screenshot, the backup took place two hours ago. However, a report was expected one hour ago. So the last report was successful, but is too old. This is because you configured the backup set in duplicati monitoring with a very low backup interval (probably one hour). You should set the interval of the backup set in duplicati monitoring to something higher. If you are okay if the last successful backup is one day old, then configure it as one day. It is no problem that duplicati backups run more frequently.