Uptime Monitoring & Other Questions v6

[johnlockie]

Congrats on a great product. Just put this in yesterday and already see some alerts that might need immediate attention.

A couple usability questions....

1. I found the dashboard under VM Trends for uptime. It is very simple. Is there a way I can get detailed uptime report for specific virtual machines?

2. I read on the forum that there is a place in the Veeam Monitor client to see last boot time for a vm. I cannot find this in v6. I read that it is under "Summary" tab, but which Summary tab?

3. Is there a way that Veeam ONE can monitor specific scheduled tasks within a vm? Or, a way to run scripts and have the output of the script go to the database for VeeamONE rather than email? For example, I would like to verify a specific website is up and reachable. We can do this with scripts or other monitoring solutions like SolarWinds or Nagios, but can we get this with VeeamONE? I see we can monitor services, which is nice. I am hoping to get more granular. If the answer is "No" (which I suspect it is), would this be on the roadmap maybe?

4. How do you get this cool graph style? http://www.veeam.com/images/screenshots ... vmware.png

I answered #4 myself. Simple: Options > Client Options > Charts

Thanks!
J

[Vitaliy S.]

Hi John,

1. I found the dashboard under VM Trends for uptime. It is very simple. Is there a way I can get detailed uptime report for specific virtual machines?

Yes, there is a way to see a detailed information on all VMs. To do that you should either click on the widget's options and choose to view the entire report, or you can navigate to Workspace tab -> Templates and search for "uptime" to locate the VM Uptime report.

2. I read on the forum that there is a place in the Veeam Monitor client to see last boot time for a vm. I cannot find this in v6. I read that it is under "Summary" tab, but which Summary tab?

We have removed this information from the VM summary tab, as we are now showing uptime information on the dashboard and via VM Uptime report.

3. Is there a way that Veeam ONE can monitor specific scheduled tasks within a vm? Or, a way to run scripts and have the output of the script go to the database for VeeamONE rather than email? For example, I would like to verify a specific website is up and reachable. We can do this with scripts or other monitoring solutions like SolarWinds or Nagios, but can we get this with VeeamONE? I see we can monitor services, which is nice. I am hoping to get more granular. If the answer is "No" (which I suspect it is), would this be on the roadmap maybe?

Yes, you're right, currently we do not monitor specific tasks within a VM, however this feature is on my radar and is planned for the next releases.

Out of curiosity, could you please tell me what tasks would you like to monitor? Processes and services, IIS websites, application specific activities? And thank you for you kind words about the product!

[johnlockie]

Thanks!!! For sure we want to monitor web sites (our sites), and whether they are up or not.

Something fairly "trick" that I dream about is the ability for a monitoring system to receive emails on a scheduled basis, and to process those emails and display the contents as "red light" or "green light". Here is an example (and I am goign to keep this fairly generic so I apologize for any confusion): every hour we have a piece of equipment that FTPs contents of data recieved to another server. This content is encrypted, gets descrypted by the server and placed (via CIFS/SMB) on another network share. From that network share, it gets processed by another server and put in to a database. We monitor this via staging scripts (I made that term up). At each stage. and at the successful completion of each process an email is generated and sent to those who need to know. Email is generated on both successful and failed attempt. Now, some of these processes we can re-write as PERL, or maybe using Powershell is good enough so that maybe whatever monitoring system we use can do the execution of the script and parse the results. For example, I believe Nagios goes this deep, and so does SolarWinds. This might be hard to code though, so another way it could be done (in theory) is that the monitoring system checks and inbox, processes the mail and based on codes in the mail displays a "success" or "error" light under that process on a NOC page. This way, we can look at a screen and see at noon that we have 12 "green light" for a process that happens every hour (starting at 12am). Does this make sense?

One last quick UI question: I see on the demo / training docs that in Veeam Monitor under "Infrastructure View" there seems to be a way to display speedometer type windows rather than the pie chart "host state" windows. I cannot find an option to display these, so maybe the screen shots I am seeing are from version 5? I really like those speedometers

[johnlockie]

Excuse the bad grammar....replied in a rush.

[Vitaliy S.]

Hmm...that's really interesting! Not sure that the emails approach is the best one and the easiest to implement, but if your script could log a corresponding event log in a Windows Event Log, then it would be easier for an application to parse this log and raise a red flag if something goes wrong. What do you think?

Yes, these screenshots were taken from the previous version of Veeam ONE.

[johnlockie]

That would work. We are not using event logging, but this is not a bad idea....

Not really sure what people use for event log parsing either

[johnlockie]

oh snap.... "eventcreate"....this is very interesting.

[Vitaliy S.]

Yes, using event log for these purposes gives you more flexibility in terms of integration with 3rd party monitoring systems.

[johnlockie]

Yeah I have tested this morning one of my scripts. The nice thing is, I can drop variables in the log file to print more detailed results too. We can assign our own event IDs, etc.

So if Veeam added event monitoring that would be huge. For now, I will look in to other systems.

I think the way I will propose this to my colleagues is that we drop an event (success or error) for each step or process in our business flow. So in the example below we might ahve (3) events entered. I would then monitor for these events and display the last 12 or 24 with green or red check marks on a basic web site.

This method is nearly limitless I think.

[Vitaliy S.]

Yep, anything is possible with a proper technology. Glad that my advice helped and thank you for confirming the need of the event log monitoring

[jeremyh8]

i see in this post where it says we can monitor servcies with veeamone. I am wanting to get notified when certain services are disabled or stopped on my vms. How do i do this?

[Vitaliy S.]

Hi Jeremy,

Veeam ONE does not monitor services within a Guest OS, but we are investigating possibilities of adding this functionality to our next releases. Currently you can only review active processes though a Processes Tab.

Thanks!

[jeremyh8]

well atleat i know why i couldnt find it