I just asked support the following question:

Is there any kind of daemon/app/api I can have running on my Ubuntu server or elsewhere that will notify my as soon as an automated backup starts or completes? Maybe something I can tie in with IFTTT or something so I can get a text or email.

The reason is that as there's no "hot" backup option and I can't take a server offline for 30 minutes to snapshot, then the next best thing is to do any risky server updates right after a server backup. To have notification that a backup has started means I get prepare to do the updates immediately after it's finished.

As usual, they answered extremely quickly....

Regarding the notification of back completion, you could use the API to pull the events for the droplet, but that application would need to keep state ( or at least track event ids ) to identify new events and the statuses. This would need to run periodically as there is no hook mechanism to send out the update.

I'm feeling a bit in over my head having had a poke around the API. I was just wondering if anyone else had implemented anything like this. I was thinking something clever might be to use IFTTT to "ping" something on the server every 10 minutes, then send an sms and/or email if the backup had started or was running or complete or something.