MaxBack Watchdog

The MaxBack Watchdog monitors your VssWriter services, checks that backups are running on schedule, and alerts you when something needs attention.

What the Watchdog does

The Watchdog is a Windows service (MaxBack.Watchdog) that runs alongside your VssWriter instances. It handles three things:

1. Service monitoring — Detects when a VssWriter service has stopped and restarts it automatically, with retries and escalation.

2. Backup schedule monitoring — Checks whether your databases are being backed up on schedule. If a backup window passes without a successful backup, you get an alert.

3. Notifications — Sends alerts through email (SMTP) or webhooks when something goes wrong — or when things complete successfully, if you want that too.

The Watchdog is installed automatically by the MaxBack setup. It starts after the VssWriter services and requires no configuration to begin monitoring services.

What triggers a notification

The Watchdog can notify you about these events:

Notifications only fire on state changes — you won't get the same alert every two minutes.

Log files

The Watchdog writes log files to:

C:\ProgramData\Dbosoft\MaxBack\Watchdog\logs

Warnings and errors are also written to the Windows Application Event Log (source: MaxBack Watchdog), so they show up in Event Viewer and can be picked up by your existing monitoring tools.

Configuration with the command line

All Watchdog settings are managed through maxback.vssclient. See the Command-Line Reference for the full list of commands, or jump directly to:

• Watchdog options — adjust check intervals, grace periods, and retry limits
• Notification channels — set up email and webhook delivery
• Credentials — manage SMTP and OAuth2 authentication
• Backup schedules — define expected backup windows per database