I am pretty sure that if the SSIS service is not running, you can't do most SSIS related tasks such as deploying to an SSIS catalog.

I am a little surprised...

Our solution is a bit different than yours, but our RTO and RPO drives it differently than yours does.

We used to use maintenance plans, but have switched over to direct...

Pretty sure you are just stuck waiting for it to finish rolling back.

Basically, if the query made changes to anything, SQL needs to undo those changes.

I would check the results...

To me this sounds like the audit is running as a different account than the backup.

When you create the audit file on the local drive, who is the "owner" of...

Since it is going out to a network share, it could be that someone else is doing something on that share at the same time as your backup.  I am...

My first step - check the logs.

Is the error coming from the load balancer or SSRS?  Do you get the same error if  you go directly to the machine rather...

Check your execution plans.  That will be the best way to tell what is changing with performance.

As for returning NULL when there is data, chances are the stored procedure is...

How busy is the disk when you go to do the backup?  Is it an SSD or HDD?

I have a database that is roughly 400 GB and it can back...

My guess (as I've not seen your system or that behavior before) is that it isn't actually fixing anything.  What I expect is happening is you have a query that...

If memory serves, ASYNC_IO_COMPLETION wait type is related to writing to disk.  Quick google tells me that is correct:

Occurs while waiting for non-data-file disk I/O to complete. For example while...

It depends on the query.  If the query is an INSERT or an UPDATE query, adding an index may slow it down.

You can update statistics though without creating indexes.  Those...

The issue is with your UPDATE.

So lets run through this code logically.

Make the objects - no problem here

Set variables - no problem here

loop - "while @rows > 0" ok, lest...

I think you forgot the execution plan.  Without that it is incredibly hard to say with any certainty what would help.

indexes may help, or you may already have the ones...

I've found that SOMETIMES you need a CHAR(10) AND CHAR(13) before it puts in a new line.  Other times, I've found that having both confuses the tool representing the data...

Yep.  Alternately to making your presence known online, if you know people in your community who are looking for DBA's or even a DBA group (SQL Server user group in...