# Backup Status

**Purpose:** Job outcomes over time and in detail. A proportional trend of success, warning, and failure across the estate, over a grid of every job with its protected object count, protected space, retention, and error state.

![Backup Status stacked area chart of success, warning and failed proportions over time above a job detail grid, with device and job names redacted](https://visualoneintelligence.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/voi-docs-backup-status.png)

## When to use it

- Show whether backup reliability is improving or degrading over months rather than nights
- Find the jobs generating warnings before they become failures
- Check retention settings against policy across every job at once
- Identify jobs protecting zero objects, which are configured and doing nothing

## Key areas and metrics

- **Status trend.** A stacked area chart on a percentage axis with three bands, success, warning, and failed, plotted over the selected window. Hovering a date shows the counts behind the proportions. Carries zoom presets, explicit date pickers, an export menu, and a per-panel email action.
- **Job grid.** Device Name, Type, Job Name, Protected Objects, Protected Space (GiB), Retention (Days), Errors, Status, and Error Message.

Because the chart is proportional rather than absolute, it answers what share of jobs succeeded and not how many. A small estate and a large one look identical, and adding jobs changes the proportions without anything getting better or worse.

## Warning is the band to watch

Failures get attention because they page somebody. Warnings do not, which is why a growing warning band is the more useful early signal on this chart. It usually means jobs are completing with skipped objects, partial sets, or expiring credentials, and each of those is a real coverage gap that reports as a success.

A warning band that expands steadily over months while failures stay near zero is the pattern worth escalating, because the trend line is doing the work no single night's report would show.

## Reading the grid

- **Protected Objects of zero** on a job that reports success means the job ran and protected nothing. Usually an empty scope or a filter that no longer matches anything.
- **Protected Space of zero** alongside a non-zero object count points at a metadata-only or control job rather than a data backup.
- **Retention (Days)** is the fastest compliance check in the section. Sort by it and any job below policy is immediately visible.
- **Status values may use the source platform's own vocabulary** rather than a normalized one, since several backup products feed this grid.

## Common actions

- **Set the window to a year** before drawing any conclusion about direction. A month of this chart is noise.
- **Sort by Errors descending** to get the jobs needing attention, then read the Error Message column for the cause.
- **Group by Device Name** to see whether problems concentrate on one backup appliance.
- **Filter Protected Objects to zero** as a standing check for jobs that have quietly stopped covering anything.

## Tips

> A high success percentage on this screen says nothing about whether everything is covered. It measures the jobs that exist. Use the VM Audit Report for coverage, and this screen for reliability of what is already configured.

## Related screens

[VM Audit Report](https://visualoneintelligence.com/docs/backup-vm-audit-report/) answers the coverage question this screen cannot. [Backup Runtime](https://visualoneintelligence.com/docs/backup-runtime/) covers whether successful jobs still fit the window. [Backup Pool Summary](https://visualoneintelligence.com/docs/backup-pool-summary/) shows whether there is capacity for the retention these jobs are set to.

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Source: https://visualoneintelligence.com/docs/backup-status/