Veeam ONE vNEXT feedback/wishlist

[stingray75]

I've been working with support on a performance issue (Matthew was v helpful by the way) and we talked about how dashboard widgets are generated.

To increase performance of dashboards, could you cache the widgets? Because dashboard are not generally used for real-time monitoring (we tend to use Monitor) it doesn't make sense that the widget is refreshed every time a user browses to it. I find they can take a long time (ie minutes) to appear, which is especially frustrating when showing dashboards to upper management.

It would be nice if we could set each widget to autorefresh in the background every x hours or so, so when we visit a dashboard the widget information is displayed immediately. Most of the widgets I use are based on trend information from the last week, so I won't mind if it was refreshed 20 hours ago. On the flip side, if I want to see Top N VM CPU Usage I would certainly want it refreshed either real-time or within the last hour.

[Vitaliy S.]

On Monitor VM view summary tab, please could you display how many CPUs and Memory the VM has. This would help us understand alarms and performance metrics more easily, otherwise I have to keep going back to vCenter to confirm.

This kind of information is displayed on the VMs tab of the root object within Monitor Client, but thanks for the feedback! Let me see where this info can be placed on the summary.

Also, it would be nice to display business view tags on the summary screen, such as line of business, application name etc. The use case is when we get performance problems or alarms, it's so useful to know who the VM belongs to or what application it's running to determine criticality etc. We're working on sync'ing Veeam business view with our asset management software so being able to display this in Veeam Monitor would be v useful - we already show this information in vCenter.

What about allowing Business View to work with VM tags? VMs will be grouped according to the their existing tags. Would that help?

[Vitaliy S.]

To increase performance of dashboards, could you cache the widgets? Because dashboard are not generally used for real-time monitoring (we tend to use Monitor) it doesn't make sense that the widget is refreshed every time a user browses to it. I find they can take a long time (ie minutes) to appear, which is especially frustrating when showing dashboards to upper management.

As far as I remember there should be some caching for the widgets. Can you please tell me your support case, so I could discuss this behavior with our dev team?

It would be nice if we could set each widget to autorefresh in the background every x hours or so, so when we visit a dashboard the widget information is displayed immediately. Most of the widgets I use are based on trend information from the last week, so I won't mind if it was refreshed 20 hours ago. On the flip side, if I want to see Top N VM CPU Usage I would certainly want it refreshed either real-time or within the last hour.

Makes sense, let me talk to our dev guys about this.

[Vitaliy S.]

Matthew,

As regards to your features requests for widget auto refresh and caching...can you please tell me how many objects (hosts/VMs/datastores) do you have in the VI?

Thanks!

[stingray75]

What about allowing Business View to work with VM tags? VMs will be grouped according to the their existing tags. Would that help?

That would be great, as we currently use a PowerCLI script to read in our asset management dump and write attributes to vCenter so we already have that information. It seems that currently with Veeam ONE we would need to write a script to import the asset information into Veeam, which then writes out to vCenter. Personally, I'd prefer Veeam to read in vCenter VM tags/attributes as we sometimes manually update non-asset management related vCenter attributes ourselves.

[stingray75]

As regards to your features requests for widget auto refresh and caching...can you please tell me how many objects (hosts/VMs/datastores) do you have in the VI?

We have 104 hosts, 1820 VMs and 405 datastores (split across two vCenters)

[Vitaliy S.]

Matthew,

We already have caching for widgets, so in order to see what could be causing this slowdown, can we take a look at your debug logs? Let me know your case ID, so I could instruct our support engineer on what info is required.

Thanks!

[jgreenback]

Just recently got our VeeamONE v7 installed and like what I see.
We're more focused on vCloud Director and would love to see some vCloud Dir Widgets added to upcoming releases.

[Vitaliy S.]

Jason, you can create vCloud based widgets even now (TOP N VMs based on any performance metric), we just do not have them pre-defined. BTW, what kind of widgets are you looking for?

[jgreenback]

@Vitaliy S. ,
Can you point me to a user guide that covers creating vCloud based widgets? I'm not able to find one that is vCloud specific.

We'd like to see widgets similar to what we see in Veeam ONE monitor > vCloud Infrastructure view configurable /per Organization so that we can allow the Org Admins to monitor there workloads. Also an overall Director/Manager friendly set of graphs/charts showing high level stats.

Thanks for your help Vitaliy

[Vitaliy S.]

Can you please try to select VMware performance widget pack and check if you see any vCloud Director filters there?

[EricZBA]

I wish the Veeam Backup reports where included in the free version of Veeam One. The fact that Veeam B&R doesn't have a built in way of scheduling reports is probably one of the only deficiencies vs other backup products.

[Vitaliy S.]

Hi Eric, how many hosts do you currently have and what edition of Veeam B&R are you using?

[EricZBA]

Hi Eric, how many hosts do you currently have and what edition of Veeam B&R are you using?

We have 15 VMware hosts (30 CPUs) and we are using Veeam B&R Enterprise Plus. Everything works great but the lack of scheduled reports is one feature we'd love to have. We looked at scheduling daily notifications with Veeam Backup Enterprise Manager but that only fires up a very short email saying how many jobs gave errors or succeeded.

We looked at Veeam One and the Backup and Replication reports look like exactly what we would want. We used them during the 30 day trial and were happy with them. Unfortunately management won't approve budget to add Veeam One at the moment. Maybe next year

I get why some of the other VMware/Hyper-V reports are either closed off or limited to a day in the free version and thats fine. I think it would be a good idea to expand some of the Veeam specific reports to be available in the free functionality mode. Specifically the VM Backup Status report would be helpful to get every morning at a set time vs getting a single email for every backup job as each completes which is the current way you can get reports in Veeam B&R.

Having said all that, Veeam rocks and you guys are awesome

[Vitaliy S.]

Eric, not sure about the regular pricing, but upgrading to Backup Management Suite shouldn't cost a lot. Thanks for such a detailed feedback anyway, much appreciated!

[Kyrikaze]

Hi,

When (if you plan it) do you intend to add a function as asked by a lot of people (like me) to make possible to :

[*]monitor directly a "service or a process" by creating some Alert and/or notification sending an email when a "service" is down or up.
[*]Montiroring email, DB, Web services or any other services.

Actually people are using Nagios, Zabbix or other application to do this.
Having only one App like Veeam One doing this will be really really much apprecied.

[Vitaliy S.]

Hello!

Thanks for the feedback, much appreciated. This feature is still on our radar. Can you please tell me if you have the same account to access all these VMs to monitor services or every VM has its own access account?

Thanks!

[Kyrikaze]

I can managed all my VM with the same account cause they all are joined to an Active Directory.
What we are looking for in our team, is to have a big screen on the wall of the IT room with a graph of all services status in real time.
So we can be aware of any interruption when it happen without having to read our email.

[Vitaliy S.]

Thanks for the feedback, so if we expose the list of all services and let you choose what to monitor would this help? Is this what you are after?

[Kyrikaze]

Yes, I'm looking for a feature that let me choose wich services I can monitor.
I would like to be able to manage alerts on those services and to be able to see them through a screen showing all those service running or broken with something similar to what I have with my Server.

Green color = Service is running
Red color = Service is stopped
Orange color = Service as restarded a few secondes ago.

[Vitaliy S.]

Makes sense! Let me see what we can do in our next updates to address this. Thanks!

[nmace]

Hi,

When (if you plan it) do you intend to add a function as asked by a lot of people (like me) to make possible to :

[*]monitor directly a "service or a process" by creating some Alert and/or notification sending an email when a "service" is down or up.
[*]Montiroring email, DB, Web services or any other services.

Actually people are using Nagios, Zabbix or other application to do this.
Having only one App like Veeam One doing this will be really really much apprecied.

I use VeeamOne for all of the things VeeamOne does. However we also used Icinga (Nagios fork) for monitoring services. If that functionality could be rolled up into VeeamOne, that would beyond awesome. So count me as another customer who would love to see this feature.

Also, a native OS X client would be awesome. But I'd rather have the ability to monitor services.

[Vitaliy S.]

Thanks for chiming in!

[ivanus]

I would like to be able to:

- select a custom time frame in the period dropdown
- ability to zoom inside the graph
- ability to see process's evolution, when for example you have a spike in CPU but no event occurred, and it comes from some windows process.

[Vitaliy S.]

Hi Radu,

1. If you're referring to choosing custom frame in the Monitor Client, then it is possible, you need to select the last option and then choose the period you want to review performance data for.
2. Veeam ONE stores 5 minutes intervals for the past week and 2 hours data stamps for the rest of the time. Would you like to see these intervals when you choose, let's say past month on the graph by clicking zoom into the graph option? Is this what you're after?
3. Hmm... would you like to map process resource usage to the performance graphs of the VM?

Thanks!

[ivanus]

1. Right, this will help me
2. does not apply anymore because of the custom option from point 1.
3. I have a big spike on every VM, every day, at a certain hour (never the same time, but always in the night), and no other process like back-up or replication is happening in that time frame. It would be nice if I could see for that period of time, what windows process was active and consumed the most of the CPU and or memory, so I can determine better the cause of the spike.

[Vitaliy S.]

If it only backup/replication jobs are running I would check processes that are responsible for VSS freeze, also antivirus software can also be the reason for this. Thanks for the feedback anyway!

[jason1320]

On data charts in the client it would be nice to zoom in and out of the data. There are times when a large spike can obscure data for long periods of time making it difficult to see relationships between small data points. For example if I am looking at latency on a datastore stacked by VM. If most VMs operate around 45ms and one spikes to 1000+ I can no longer see the detail of all the other VMs.

[hkydan]

Not sure if the ability is there and I am missing it?? Would like to be able to assign alerts to different groups of VM's say different Business view categories. Example VM Group A alerts go to email address A. VM Group B alerts go to email address B. and email address C gets alerts for everything.

Regards,
Dan

[veremin]

Not sure if the ability is there and I am missing it??

It's already there. Please, see this topic for further explanations. Thanks.