Backup Failed Metric

Hi there,

I understand that you are not seeing the NumberOfBackupJobsFailed metric in your CloudWatch.

If there is no datapoint for a specific metric in a reporting period, then the AWS Backup service would not emit any datapoint for that period to CloudWatch. The docuemntation here [1] states the "Reporting Criteria" as "There is a nonzero value". This means that only if there is a number higher than 0 reported for that specific metric (i.e. any number higher than 0) would CloudWatch recieve any datapoint correlated to this metric. CloudWatch will display a metric in the CloudWatch console for 14 days since the last time it recieved a metric [2]. If no datapoint for a metric is recieved within the past 14 days, then the metric would not be seen in the console. You cannot change this behaviour for an AWS service provided metric (i.e. to emit a 0 metric every period).

As for your specific use case, this would technically be a good thing as it would indicate no backup jobs have failed, hence why no datapoints are available.

I hope this helps!

Ahmad

[1] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/aws-backup/latest/devguide/cloudwatch.html#monitoring-metrics-with-cloudwatch