Deprecation of Backup Radar release notes and product updates

Hey ​@5GN-Lee! Thanks for submitting this and sorry you’re feeling like we’ve dropped the ball on communicating Backup Radar product updates.

I’ve asked my Product team to take a look at this and respond with respond with when our next update will be and how you can get notified of product updates moving forward. Stay tuned!

Hi ​@5GN-Lee - 

My name is Jamie and I’m the Product Manager responsible for Backup Radar. Thanks for bringing this up—we really appreciate your feedback and understand how important it is to stay informed about product changes. I’d like to provide some clarity and updates on what’s been happening with Backup Radar.

1. Recent Updates & Communication:

We did release a new Axcient Integration in October 2024, along with a new Backup Metadata Template Filter in Jan 2025. The latter was communicated via in-app messaging, as it enhanced an existing feature (Templates) rather than introducing something entirely new. That said, we understand that this may have been easy to miss if you weren’t actively using that feature.

2. Behind-the-Scenes Enhancements:

Not all updates are immediately visible, but they involve significant development. For example, integrating Backup Radar into the ScalePad Hub alongside our other products was a major project in Q4 2024. These kinds of enhancements improve the product’s foundation, even if they don’t result in noticeable UI changes right away. We’ve also put considerable effort in improving the performance of the application based on feedback.

3. Upcoming Releases (subject to change)

We’ve got a lot planned for this year:

• Q1: Two new backup vendor integrations are on the horizon.

• Q2: Templates Overhaul: We’re replacing Templates with a new feature called Backup Plans, which will offer granular scheduling, real-time ticketing, and an SLA-focused approach (e.g., ensuring at least one successful backup per day rather than just flagging warnings/failures).

We’re tackling a Unified Job View to better represent local, replication, and screenshot backups as a single job with multiple dimensions—more in line with how these are displayed in the original backup applications. We’re also improving how company/device data integrates with ScalePad Hub and Lifecycle Manager for a more unified platform experience.

4. Regarding Silent Updates:

Could you share more details on the specific “silent updates” you’ve noticed? Generally, we avoid releasing updates that introduce observable changes without communication, unless they are bug fixes that shouldn’t impact the UI or user workflows. Your insights here would help us investigate further.

5. Release Notes Transparency:

You’re right—we don’t currently have a dedicated Release Notes page, but we are actively discussing how to standardize release communications across all our products. Your feedback will definitely help push this forward, and we’ll keep the community updated on any changes to how we share product updates.

Thanks again for reaching out, and please let me know if you have any specific concerns or questions—I’m here to help! Dropping my email address as well in case you’d like to chat further in person in which case I can schedule a call - jamie.kandola@scalepad.com. 

Thanks for the comprehensive reply Jamie - I do appreciate the time you’ve taken.

From my perspective, a lot of what you have flagged I have noticed and have seen notifications for which is great - I can confirm that the notices for large feature releases or enhancements definitely is noticeable and works.

Where the process seems to fall down is during (what I assume is) the monthly release cycle where functionality is changed and there’s no notification.

One this month, as of the 1st of Feb there’s been a change to how BR handles Configuration Backups coming from Veeam. Historically, Veeam truncated the domain off the end of the server name so you ended up with a policy with server name “SERVER1”. Now since the change, configuration backups ingest using the full hostname, so for example “SERVER1.CONTOSO.LOCAL”. Support ticket #172765 for reference.

Whilst not a huge change, this results in 1 No Result ticket per backup server. With no notification of this change coming into effect on the 1st of Feb the Monday resulted in 30+ No Result tickets. We now have to merge all our existing policies into the new policies created by Backup Radar, one by one because there’s no intelligence within Backup Radar to help match during merging.

A more serious change that affected us quite severely was in December when there was a change to the Veeam Service Provider integration that resulted in all the backup job names changing unannounced. I had a semi-long running ticket running that went back and forth with misinformation being provided, and eventually the change seemingly being rolled back by development. AJ helped significantly at the tail of that ticket which again was appreciated. This is all under ticket #155526.

Ultimately, whilst the big feature additions are great and certainly appeal to the masses from a product perspective, it’s the small potentially breaking changes that go unannounced that seem to be causing the most pain.

​@5GN-Lee - Thanks for the detailed feedback and for sharing the ticket numbers—they’ll help as I dig into this. Based on your details, I can see how frustrating these unannounced changes have been and I apologize for this disruption.

I’ll connect with our internal team to identify the root causes and see how we can improve. I’ll follow up with you by early next week. Thanks again for bringing this to my attention.

- Jamie