FS-DOC-03Operations
Process Runbook / SOP
System Backup Monitoring
[YourCompany.com] · IT Department · Prepared by FullSpec · [Today's Date]
This runbook is the day-to-day operating guide for the System Backup Monitoring automation. It tells your IT Administrator exactly what the automation does on its own each morning, where the single human checkpoint sits, how to handle anything that goes wrong, and how to keep the system accurate over time. FullSpec has built and configured the automation end to end. Your team's responsibility is to maintain the expected job list, respond to escalated alerts, and confirm resolutions in Jira.
01Process overview
Every night, scheduled backup jobs run across your servers, cloud volumes, and endpoints. Each morning the automation connects to Veeam, retrieves all overnight job results, compares them against your expected job list in Google Sheets, assigns a severity level to any anomaly, creates a Jira ticket per failure, sends a Slack alert to the relevant on-call owner, escalates critical failures through PagerDuty, and writes a complete audit row to Google Sheets for every job checked. All of this happens before business hours without anyone logging in. The IT Administrator only acts when a real incident requires investigation and resolution.
Process name
System Backup Monitoring
Trigger
Daily scheduled run, configured time each morning, fires automatically without any manual action
Final output
All job results logged to Google Sheets audit trail; Jira ticket per failure; Slack alert to on-call owner; PagerDuty incident for any critical severity classification
Agents running
Backup Status Collector, Failure Classifier and Escalation Agent, Audit Log Writer
Tools involved
Veeam, Google Sheets, Jira, Slack, PagerDuty, Gmail
Weekly volume
Approximately 120 backup jobs monitored per month across servers, cloud, and endpoints
Human checkpoint
IT Administrator investigates the root cause and confirms resolution before closing the Jira ticket
Process owner
[Your name], IT Administrator
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02Step-by-step: what happens and who acts
What you actually need to do: there is one human step in this entire process. When a Jira ticket lands in your queue following a failure alert, you investigate the root cause, carry out or confirm a remediation, and then close the ticket in Jira and mark the Google Sheets row as resolved. Everything else runs automatically.
Step
What happens
Who acts
Type
1
The automation platform fires on the configured daily schedule each morning, before business hours begin, initiating the full backup check cycle.
Automation platform
Automated
2
The Backup Status Collector agent calls the Veeam REST API and retrieves the status, start time, end time, and error message for every backup job that ran in the past 24 hours.
Backup Status Collector
Automated
3
The Backup Status Collector reads the expected job list from Google Sheets and cross-references it with the retrieved Veeam results, flagging every job that is missing, failed, or in a warning state.
Backup Status Collector
Automated
4
The Failure Classifier and Escalation Agent reads the structured result list and assigns a severity level (critical, warning, or informational) to each anomaly using the pre-configured rules set during onboarding.
Failure Classifier and Escalation Agent
Automated
5
For every failed or missing job, the Failure Classifier and Escalation Agent automatically creates a Jira incident ticket, pre-populated with the job name, affected system, severity level, error message, and timestamp.
Failure Classifier and Escalation Agent
Automated
6
A Slack message is posted to the relevant channel or sent as a direct message to the on-call owner, summarising the failure and linking directly to the Jira ticket for immediate context.
Failure Classifier and Escalation Agent
Automated
7
If the severity is classified as critical, the Failure Classifier and Escalation Agent creates a PagerDuty incident, triggering the on-call escalation policy configured in PagerDuty to ensure an immediate response.
Failure Classifier and Escalation Agent
Automated
8
You receive the Jira ticket and Slack alert, log into the affected system, investigate the root cause of the failure, and carry out or arrange the appropriate remediation action.
IT Administrator
Human
9
The Audit Log Writer agent appends a row to the central Google Sheets backup log for every job checked that day, recording the outcome, ticket reference, severity, and run timestamp, completing the audit trail without any manual entry.
Audit Log Writer
Automated
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03Handling exceptions
Situation
What the system does
What you do
A backup job result is missing from the Veeam API response (the job did not appear in the log at all)
The Backup Status Collector compares the expected job list in Google Sheets against the retrieved results. Any job present in the sheet but absent from the API response is flagged as a missing job and passed to the Failure Classifier, which raises a Jira ticket and sends a Slack alert with a missing-job classification.
Open the Veeam console and confirm whether the job ran or was skipped. Check if the job was renamed, decommissioned, or moved. If it is a genuine miss, investigate the scheduler. Update the expected job list in Google Sheets if the job has been permanently removed or renamed.
The same failure generates a duplicate Jira ticket (for example, the automation runs twice or a retry fires unexpectedly)
The Failure Classifier checks for an open Jira ticket with a matching job name and date before creating a new one. If a matching open ticket already exists, it updates that ticket with a note rather than creating a duplicate.
If you see two tickets for the same job on the same date, close the newer one as a duplicate and add a comment linking to the original. Report the duplicate to FullSpec at support@gofullspec.com so the deduplication logic can be reviewed.
A backup job is listed in the expected job list but no longer exists in Veeam (the system was decommissioned or the job was renamed)
The agent flags the job as missing every day until the expected job list is updated, generating false-positive alerts for a job that no longer needs monitoring.
Remove the decommissioned or renamed job from the expected job list in Google Sheets as soon as the change is made. If the job was renamed, add the new name to the sheet so monitoring continues without a gap.
You receive a Jira ticket or Slack alert but do not take action within the response window agreed during setup
The Failure Classifier does not auto-close tickets or resend alerts automatically after the initial notification. Critical failures already have a PagerDuty escalation in place that follows the on-call policy configured in PagerDuty independently of the automation.
Ensure your PagerDuty on-call schedule and escalation policy are always current so that unanswered critical alerts reach a secondary contact. For non-critical tickets, review your Jira notification settings to confirm alerts are reaching you. Contact your backup on the contact list in Section 04 if you are unavailable.
The Veeam API is unavailable or returns an error at the scheduled run time
The automation platform retries the Veeam API call up to three times with a short delay between each attempt. If all retries fail, the orchestration layer sends a system alert to the process owner via email and Slack, noting that the backup check for that day could not complete. No audit log row is written for that run.
Log into Veeam directly to perform a manual check for that morning. Confirm whether the API outage was a temporary network issue or a credential problem. If credentials have expired or permissions have changed, contact FullSpec at support@gofullspec.com to update the API configuration. Record the manual check results in the Google Sheets log yourself for that day to maintain the audit trail.
Google Sheets is unavailable or the expected job list cannot be read at run time
The Backup Status Collector cannot perform the cross-reference comparison and skips the missing-job check for that run. It logs an error internally and the Audit Log Writer cannot append results to the sheet. The Veeam API pull and severity classification still proceed using only the data returned by Veeam.
Check Google Sheets status and confirm the sheet is accessible once the outage resolves. Review the Google Sheets error notification sent by the automation. Manually verify that no jobs were missed by comparing the Veeam job list against your own copy of the expected job list. Contact FullSpec at support@gofullspec.com if the sheet connectivity issue recurs.
04Who to contact and when
Fill in the rows marked with brackets once your team is confirmed. Keep this table current so that escalation reaches the right person at every stage. The FullSpec rows are fixed and do not change.
Role
Name
How to reach them
Process owner (IT Administrator)
[Your name]
[Your email] / [Your phone or Slack handle]
Backup escalation contact (secondary on-call)
[Rep name]
[Rep email] / [Rep phone or Slack handle]
IT Manager
[Manager name]
[Manager email]
PagerDuty on-call schedule owner
[Schedule owner name]
[PagerDuty login or email]
FullSpec builder (build and configuration changes)
FullSpec team
support@gofullspec.com
FullSpec support (errors, unexpected behaviour, outages)
FullSpec support
support@gofullspec.com
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05Ongoing maintenance
Any time a backup job is added, removed, or renamed
Update the expected job list in Google Sheets immediately. Add the new job name exactly as it appears in Veeam. Remove or rename any decommissioned entries. Failing to do this will cause false-positive missing-job alerts for jobs that no longer exist, or missed detection for new jobs that are not yet on the list.
IT Administrator
Any time severity classification rules need changing (for example, a system moves from non-critical to business-critical)
Contact FullSpec at support@gofullspec.com with the updated classification rule. The severity thresholds are configured inside the automation and cannot be edited directly in Google Sheets. FullSpec will apply the change and confirm.
IT Administrator contacts FullSpec
Monthly spot-check (first working day of each month)
Open the Google Sheets audit log and confirm that a row exists for every working day in the prior month and that no large gaps appear in the timestamp column. Cross-check that the number of jobs monitored matches your expected job list count. Note any discrepancies and raise them with FullSpec.
IT Administrator
Weekly error-log review (each Monday morning)
Check the automation platform's error log or the designated error notification channel in Slack for any failed runs, API timeouts, or retry events from the prior week. If three or more errors appear in a single week, contact FullSpec for a review before they accumulate into a coverage gap.
IT Administrator
Any time a team member joins, leaves, or changes on-call responsibilities
Update the Slack channel or direct-message target in the alert configuration, update the PagerDuty on-call schedule independently in PagerDuty, and update the contact table in Section 04 of this document. Notify FullSpec if the Slack routing target stored in the automation needs to change.
IT Administrator and FullSpec (for Slack routing changes)
Quarterly volume review (every three months)
Review the total number of backup jobs being monitored against the expected job list. If your infrastructure has grown significantly, confirm that the automation platform subscription tier still covers the run frequency and volume. Contact FullSpec to discuss any capacity adjustments needed.
IT Administrator and FullSpec
The most common maintenance issue for this process is an out-of-date expected job list in Google Sheets. When new backup jobs are added to Veeam but the sheet is not updated, the agent cannot detect failures on those jobs and they fall outside the audit trail entirely. Make updating the expected job list part of your standard change-management checklist whenever a new system is provisioned or a backup job is reconfigured.
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