The Backup - Hours Since Last Differential Backup Alarm becomes active when Spotlight detects that a differential backup of the SQL Server database has never taken place or has not taken place in the last 24 hours.

Differential backups are important for mission-critical databases.

When this alarm is current:

  • Check the date and time of the last backup. You will find this information on the Databases drilldown in the Databases grid. Set the Database View to Backup Status.
  • Ensure you have appropriate backups of all necessary databases.

To exclude certain databases from the Backup - Hours Since Last Differential Backup Alarm:

  1. Open the Spotlight Client.
  2. On the Spotlight Overview page, right-click the Databases button and select Alarm Settings.
  3. Select Backup - Hours Since Last Differential Backup.
  4. Select Override the default settings for the alarm.
  5. In the lower right pane, in Do not raise an alarm for certain values, click the values link to add the name of the database you want excluded.

By default, the following databases are automatically excluded from the Backup alarms:

  • model
  • pubs
  • Northwind
  • AdventureWorks
  • QuestSoftware
  • QuestWorkDatabase
  • tempdb