Using Veeam monitor for snapshot alarms

[OREOSpeedwagon]

Question/comment:

So, we've had issues w/ our backup program not completely deleting snapshots, mostly when the job fails. This is the "consolidate-helper" "hidden" snapshot that I've seen mentioned here and several other places. This has been a huge headache for us with some of our larger VMs (over 1TB). If a job fails and we don't notice, a snapshot will hang, and if the next job fails, that'll be a second snapshot. When that second snapshot starts to purge it can bring the VM offline, and then things get ugly.

Anyhoo, I'm looking for a tool to help us monitor any hanging snapshots, especially these "hidden" ones that aren't displayed in the snapshot manager or in storage views. So, my question is:

Will Veeam Monitor see those snapshots?

I've installed a trial of the 5 Beta and haven't noticed any alarms from that hanging snapshot, but that's because of another issue. It doesn't appear that Veeam will auto-resolve an alarm. Meaning, it will fire an alarm at night when the backup job creates a snapshot, but it won't resolve that alarm when the snapshot is deleted. It defaults to just repeating the alarm every 10 minutes. How do we auto-resolve that alarm?

Sorry for the long winded post, I'm just trying to paint an accurate picture of our issue.

Thanks!

[Vitaliy S.]

Hello,

This alarm should have a "Resolved" status if you do not have snapshots created for the VM. Monitor raises the snapshot alarm based on the snapshot files found on the datastore, but not in the Snapshot Manager. To take it another way, we will raise an alarm of a hidden snapshot as well, which are not visible in the Snapshot Manager.

If you still have this alarm raised, please browse your datastore and search for the orphaned snapshots created for the VM. As soon as there are no snapshot files on the Datastore, the alarm's status will be changed to "Resolved".

Thanks!

[OREOSpeedwagon]

Well, that's good to hear that it will actually scan the datastore and not just rely on what's in snapshot manager! But, I did scan the datastore and there are no delta files, but the alarm is still raised. I went ahead and set it to resolved to see what happens next.

Another question... Does this tool only run as a centralized console? Is there a web version or a client that can be ran off a user PC?

[Gostev]

Vitaly just went to devs to confirm the autoresolve feature, so I am taking over

Answering your question, Veeam Monitor has a client/server architecture. Which means, you can have "client" monitor install (essentially just UI) on as many user workstations as you want (setup allows you to do client-only install). All these clients will be connecting to a single Monitor server to get the monitoring data.

[OREOSpeedwagon]

Well, thanks for stepping in! You guys are pretty quick to respond, and that's a welcome change over dealing with Symantec.



Well, here's another question then!

When drilling down to investigate Datastore metics under "Datastores" will display the VMFS display name, which is handy. But, if I then go to a host and look under "Disk", it then reverts to the naa.xxx name. This makes troubleshooting a bit harder because now I have to translate that display name into a naa name. It would be pretty handy if you could use the datastore name consistently throughout the GUI!

[Vitaliy S.]

I've just re-confirmed that we should resolve the snapshot alarm, so let me try to reproduce your issue in my labs and as soon as I have the results I will post you back!

As regards the ESX Server and Disk tab view, actually, we display all the devices' names in the same manner as vSphere Client does, but let me also check what we can do to make it more friendly to read. Thank you for your feedback!

[OREOSpeedwagon]

Funny thing, just happened again. I reset that alarm and now I'm showing a new one for a snapshot. I looked in the datastore and I don't see any snaps there. I've got a couple of screencaps, but I just noticed you can add attachments to posts here...

[Vitaliy S.]

It would be great if you could share the screenshots, I've sent you my email via PM, please have a look.

[derekross]

It seems I may be having a similar issue...

A few weeks ago I received an error about my snapshot sized being over 20%. I logged into VCenter and brought up the snapshot manager and to my surprise I found an old snapshot. I merge the changed and the snapshot disappeared from snapshot manager. Today I received the alarm for the same VM. I checked snapshot manger, nothing is there. I browsed the datastore, no snapshot files are listed.

Now with that said, about 30 minutes before I got this error message, I created a snapshot for a totally different VM. Veeam Monitor is showing an error for the original VM I mentioned above.

Recap:
VM-A = No snapshots found on datastore but receiving an error about the snapshot size over 20%
VM-B = Shortly after creating a snapshot, VM-A receives errors.

[Vitaliy S.]

Derek and Pete,

Thank you for noticing this, indeed it was a bug related to improper scanning the datastore for snapshot files . This issue has already been fixed in a later build!

[derekross]

Is that build available for download?

[Gostev]

No, Vitaly is referring to internal/daily build here.