Emails to alert for job length

[chrisBrindley]

I have just been beaten up fairly badly by a customer, they lost there server and wanted a restore, great no problem, I haven't had any emails of any errors so i will get on that.
Login to server and see the Managed Customer I job has been running for 350 hours, no errors, no emails, its just stuck. Therefore i haven't got a backup since June 25th. Marvelous.

Is there any alerts in veeam that will tell us if a job has gone beyond its time allowance, we typically do snapshots everyday, so if the previous backup runs more than 24 hours we have an issue

[Vitaliy S.]

Hi Chris,

Yes, we do have this alert as predefined in Veeam ONE (part of Veeam Backup Management Suite) which provides rich capabilities of monitoring and reporting for backup infrastructures. Please check it out > http://www.veeam.com/virtualization-man ... ution.html

Thanks!

[chrisBrindley]

We don't own veeam one

[lobo519]

This is the reason I have turned on notifications for Successful jobs and look for them every day. As for Veeam One, The price that we pay for Enterprise plus, it should be included.

[Vitaliy S.]

Veeam ONE provides advanced monitoring and reporting not only for Veeam B&R, but for VMware and Hyper-V infrastructures as well. As far as I remember we do provide lots of options that would allow you to upgrade to Veeam Backup Management Suite.

[Gostev]

@Chris, if you are Veeam Service Provider, the price for Veeam ONE should be a very small addition to your per-VM pricing, please consider this.

@lobo519 I hear what you are saying, but please also consider that we have grandfathered all existing B&R customers to Enterprise Plus for free (very few customers actually bought Enterprise Plus by now). So, including Veeam ONE in Enterprise Plus would mean giving tens of thousands of users a whole new product for free. Not a single cent made for Veeam, and tremendous increase of costs on the other hand (due to support)... sounds like a bad move in terms of business. Plus, instant Veeam ONE customer base expansion in a few times cannot be good for meeting SLAs existing Veeam ONE customers came to expect (Veeam ONE has separate R&D, QC and support specialists).

However, you are not incorrect in the overall perspective, and our goal is making the consolidated offering (Veeam Availability Suite v8) the best seller.

[chrisBrindley]

Hi Gostev, the one reason we didn't go with veeam one was we wanted it for the added backup information, when we tested it veeam one it gives you hundreds of cool features for free but the backup monitoring piece wasn't a free feature, we use Netcool, zabbix a free open source program and some solar winds products, so it was hard to convince management to purchase veeam one as a lot of the monitoring features we wouldn't use, othing bad, we just wouldnt want to train hundreds of support staff a new product, its bad enough we use DPM for hyper v, Netbackup for Physical, Veeam for vmware and Actifio for data replication.

Ken Lu from veeam is coming out Friday so i will talk to him about it, maybe the newer beta 8 veeam will have some more alerts for me.

Side note we have tested v8 against our dd860 using ddboost and the results were awsome

thanks

[chrisdearden]

why not use Veeam for hyper-V as well, it should knock one off your toolset ( and allow you to put hyper v backups on the data domain )

[veremin]

@chrisBrindley

As the last resort, you can write PowerShell script. Being executed once a day, the script will check whether there are running jobs, then, the interval during which the jobs have been running, and notify you if the interval exceeds the predefined value (say, 24 hours).

Thanks.

[lobo519]

@gostev - I appreciate the acknowledgment. I also see your point.

I get frustrated when these types of issues that affect the backup product only and the first thing we get from the Veeam guys is "Check out Veeam One".

Why do I need another product?!

[chrisBrindley]

I have spoken to our monitoring team and they say there are reports written for Zabbix to monitor the jobs, so we are going to go this route.
As to the previous question why don't we use veeam for HyperV, we use DPM, and thats free, I know all the arguments against DPM and Veeam offers a lot more features, I am on that fight too, but we need to make money, and too ask management to simply replace DPM with Veeam on 2100 virtual servers will be a significant cost.
Side note, DPM and HyperV i just don't like either

[mdornfeld]

@lobo519 I hear what you are saying, but please also consider that we have grandfathered all existing B&R customers to Enterprise Plus for free (very few customers actually bought Enterprise Plus by now). So, including Veeam ONE in Enterprise Plus would mean giving tens of thousands of users a whole new product for free. Not a single cent made for Veeam, and tremendous increase of costs on the other hand (due to support)... sounds like a bad move in terms of business. Plus, instant Veeam ONE customer base expansion in a few times cannot be good for meeting SLAs existing Veeam ONE customers came to expect (Veeam ONE has separate R&D, QC and support specialists).

The much larger maintenance fee we pay for the Enterprise Plus "free upgrade" is hardly giving customers a new product for free.
Also, since you brought it up for Veeam One, what is the SLA that we should expect for Veeam B&R? When I call for B&R support, I often sit in the phone queue for well over 15 minutes, if not much, much longer.

[mdornfeld]

I should mention that while the wait for support is painful, I do appreciate that all of the support personnel are very knowledgeable, polite, and ultimately helpful.

[Gostev]

Maintenance covers support costs (there are more features in higher editions that we need to support you with), as well as our R&D costs developing the new versions, which we don't charge for upgrades separately (and you get more of the new features in higher edition), so this part is actually logical to me.

Our SLAs are the same for all products, and depend on issue severity and your support contract (Standard or Premium). You can see SLAs in our Support Policy (this document can always be found in Support menu on veeam.com).

I would recommend opening support cases via the Customer Support portal whenever possible. This way, you don't have to sit in the phone queue at all. Also, this ultimately speeds up the case processing significantly, especially if you attach logs immediately while opening the support case.

Thank you for your kind words on about our support. Knowing your time zone, that would be our North America support team based in Columbus, Ohio that you are dealing most of the times with. Our support is 100% in-house, which of course raises our costs significantly (due to the level of salaries in US) comparing to more "classic" approach of outsourcing support in India for example, but ultimately provides much better experience for our customers (just as you noted). Just looping back to where your maintenance money go

Hope this helps!

[chrisBrindley]

I just got off the phone with a very angry customer, he has requested a daily email stating his server backed up, his server is one of hundreds in the job, is there any powershell code out there that can email a company when their servers have been completed or will i have to setup a seperate job for this particular customer.
Obviously i don't want to send him a job report of hundreds of customer backups are complete

[Gostev]

Chris, this would definitely be achievable out of box in v8 (we are adding ability to setup custom notification on per-job level, in addition to the current "global" notifications). For now, I think the PowerShell script would do. Feel free to post a query in the PowerShell forum if you need some help with that. Thanks!

[lobo519]

Chris, this would definitely be achievable out of box in v8 (we are adding ability to setup custom notification on per-job level, in addition to the current "global" notifications).

oHHH - Will we finally be able to chose success, fail, or warning on a per job level?????

that would be amazing1

[Gostev]

Yes, you can customize which events trigger notifications on a per-job basis. This has been a popular request

[aeccles]

I have just been beaten up fairly badly by a customer, they lost there server and wanted a restore, great no problem, I haven't had any emails of any errors so i will get on that.
Login to server and see the Managed Customer I job has been running for 350 hours, no errors, no emails, its just stuck. Therefore i haven't got a backup since June 25th. Marvelous.

Is there any alerts in veeam that will tell us if a job has gone beyond its time allowance, we typically do snapshots everyday, so if the previous backup runs more than 24 hours we have an issue

Was it a Backup Copy job that was hung on waiting for next copy interval?