Veeam ONE vNEXT feedback/wishlist

[stephaneH.]

Hi, for the next version i suggest to add multi level of groups for Business View.
Use case is Guest OS : GuestOS\Familly\distribution
Category = Guest OS

• Windows
  • Windows Server 2008 R2
  • Windows Server 2012
• Linux
  • RHEL4
  • RHEL5

Same use case for location :
Location\Region\country

Many thanks for the support.

[Vitaliy S.]

Thanks for sharing your use case!

[frankive]

I would like to sell Veeam One (VCP) as a service through a 443 port like Veeam Cloud Connect without the hazzle of setting up a VPN.

[Vitaliy S.]

Hi Frank!

Can you tell me a bit more on the setup you want to provide as a service? Do you host all ESXi/Hyper-V servers and offer these resources to your customers or all this hardware is installed on the client's site?

Thanks!

[jgreenback]

vCloud Feature Request:
I would like to see the vCloud vApp owner listed in the summary and would also like to select the ability (possibly via check box) to email said vApp Owner when there is an alarm on their vApp. Maybe even a selection at the Organization level to email all vApp Owners when there is an alarm. This could be propagated throughout the Organization when new vApps are created.
Thanks.

[Vitaliy S.]

Hi Jason, thanks for the feedback, much appreciated, but can you please clarify one thing for me? Since you already can specify any email in the assigned alarm settings, all vApp owners can be notified when something bad happens.

Displaying vApp owner in the summary should not be an issue, let me ask our devs to take a look at this.

[jgreenback]

I would like this to be individuals that are notified. If there are multiple users in an Organization each with multiple vApps, would we not have to create, assign to each vApp, then set the email notification for each alarm?

[Vitaliy S.]

Ah...yes, since we have multi-tenancy for vCloud Director infrastructures, we might be able to add this capability pretty easy in the next updates. Let me see what we can do.

[jgreenback]

AWESOME! Thanks

[jgreenback]

Can you tell me if the wording of this 'Org VDC memory usage' alarm can be fixed? I believe it should say "Check allocation of MEMORY resources of vApps and VMs running in this org VDC.". and not "CPU".
Thanks

[Vitaliy S.]

Good catch!

[zciklacekic]

Customizing e-mail template bodies (not subjects only) is our main concern to decide to continue with veeam monitor and backup or any other alternative. Our VM names and hostnames are generally different and does not give idea to the other admins which VM has problem with any specific issue. We are have these specific information in Vm Custom attributes, VM Tags, and from VMtools. These information can be manually set (in custom attributes and tags) like the description of the VM, location of the VM, responsible person/department of VM; adn or can be automatically changed like IP address and DNS name which can be gathered from VMtools. When an alert is created and send to the admins, we want to include these information in the e-mail body and/or subject. And we also want to remove the words "[Veeam ONE Monitor] Alarm" from the starting of the mail subject line. This is important because every mail is nearly 15K (if it is HMTL; or 10K if it is text and does not have specific information about the VM. Everyday we receive tons of mail and manually filter the mails and forward them to other admins (like local admins, backup admins, server responsibles) with manually adding some data which we gather using Vsphere client. This takes our monitoring teams all the time of the business ours. And which we cannot make automatically because of not enough information in the mail content.
So we want to add these information to the body of the mail(not just subject line).
And we want to use the e-mail address in tags (which we manually enter for each vm) to send these alerts automatically without setting them in veeam one monitor alarm settings everytime a responsible changes.
Can you please give us information about if those features will be available and if yes when?

[Vitaliy S.]

These information can be manually set (in custom attributes and tags) like the description of the VM, location of the VM, responsible person/department of VM; adn or can be automatically changed like IP address and DNS name which can be gathered from VMtools. When an alert is created and send to the admins, we want to include these information in the e-mail body and/or subject.

Veeam ONE allows working either with custom attributes or VM tags, this selection is made in the Business View configuration page. Adding VM tags to the body of the email should be an easy task.

And we also want to remove the words "[Veeam ONE Monitor] Alarm" from the starting of the mail subject line.

This line is hard coded. Do you want to replace it with some other data?

And we want to use the e-mail address in tags (which we manually enter for each vm) to send these alerts automatically without setting them in veeam one monitor alarm settings everytime a responsible changes.
Can you please give us information about if those features will be available and if yes when?

Not sure about the last one. Parsing information from VM tags and if there is an email address, then send an alert to the specified email address does not seem to be the common case.

Can you please tell me why using Veeam ONE Monitor alarm settings does't work for you? I would prefer to add more functionality to alarm settings to fit your scenario, so I would appreciate if you could elaborate on the last FR a bit more.

[zciklacekic]

Veeam ONE allows working either with custom attributes or VM tags, this selection is made in the Business View configuration page. Adding VM tags to the body of the email should be an easy task.

I really could not find how to add VMtag to the body of alert e-mails. I've imported a Tag into Business View. But there is no setting to allow me to add that tag into alarm e-mails. I think alarm e-mails is not something that can be modified. So I think you misunderstood me or I could not explain what I really wanted to explain.

This line is hard coded. Do you want to replace it with some other data?

I just want to remove this header from the subject of the mail. Otherwise we only see this sentence and not the real subject of alarm and which VM is about in small screen resolutions.

Not sure about the last one. Parsing information from VM tags and if there is an email address, then send an alert to the specified email address does not seem to be the common case.
Can you please tell me why using Veeam ONE Monitor alarm settings does't work for you? I would prefer to add more functionality to alarm settings to fit your scenario, so I would appreciate if you could elaborate on the last FR a bit more.

Let me explain in more detail. Say we have 1000 VMs. On every VM we have several tags assigned manually by admins (probably the provisioners). Say one of these tags is "Responsible" and other one is "email_of_responsible". So when this VM is created in a vcenter that is already monitored by Veeam, I want the alarms of this VM directly goes to person that is in "Responsible" tag with using e-mail address that was also in"email_of_responsible" tag. So the Body of the mail should start like this: Dear "Responsible" please take care of following condition with VM below. And there should be alarm details in the body of mail. And we also should add some other information from the VM Tags. Like Company name, Application name, Environment type, Description of the VM.
I just do not want to create an alarm group for each VM that is created. As I already have static tags on every VM, Veeam will categorize that VM into categories that were already assigned by using tags. And the alarms will automatically goes to correct responsible person with correct and enough information in the mail.

Let me tell you why we and most of the enterprise companies should need it:
We really have huge amount of VMs with small number of admins. We have some naming standard that only be known by these admins. Say the VMname of a VM is "SVPMGT016TR1301" .This means that this server is Server, Production, Virtual, Management, 16.th application (which is vmware), located inTuRkey, 13.th location (which is city of Antalya), the first machine. So the responsible person of this machine does not understand any of these information from VM name. So we assigned tags for Environment type, Application name and code, Location(both country and city or datacenter name), responsible person of this Vm, responsible department of this VM, Rpo and Rto of this VM, Backup information, etc. As we enter these information to all VM's by a script; we want to use these informations in the mail body and/or subject of the ALERT mails of Veeam One Monitor, plus we want to use some of this data to automize some tasks like creating alarm for this VM and/or adding this VM into a monitoring group to send the alert mails to correct person. Because responsibles of these machines change by time. We just want to change the tag of the VM and all other administrative work like changing the alarm group of this VM in Veeam Monitor, excluding some alerts about this VM should be automatically done. As Veeam Monitor does not allow us to do it using some other automation tools like powershell, we are doing it manually. But as we do it manually some human mistakes occurs sometimes and we and/or right responsible person may miss some critical alerts.
So again to be able to handle this:
-We need to add informations in the VM Tags(preferred) or custom attributes to Veeam ONE Monitor Alarm mail bodies and maybe mail subjects.
-Additionally we want to use one of the VM tags as e-mail targets for the alarms of that VM. Maybe we can add more functionality of using a tag as target of snmp target.
-I do not know if it is possible but, it would be nice to have VM's IP and hostname(generally this is different then VMname) gathered from VMtools into Veeam One Monitor alarm mail bodies too.
As we have lots of locations and they all managed by one central operations center this will make our lifes easy. 3 of our admins do these tasks manually every day and they spend their 3-4 hours for just this functionality.

[Vitaliy S.]

Thanks for such detailed feedback and clarifications.

I really could not find how to add VMtag to the body of alert e-mails

I meant to say that it would be easy for us to add this functionality in the next update, sorry for this misunderstanding.

So again to be able to handle this:
-We need to add informations in the VM Tags(preferred) or custom attributes to Veeam ONE Monitor Alarm mail bodies and maybe mail subjects.

I have created a feature request to include this data to the body of email in the next update.

-Additionally we want to use one of the VM tags as e-mail targets for the alarms of that VM. Maybe we can add more functionality of using a tag as target of snmp target.

I see the use case here, but what if we allow specifying email address/SNMP receiver for each Business View group we create in Veeam ONE? This would allow you to send emails to application owners only, besides parsing VM tag for some custom actions be it either email address/SNMP receiver or something else does not seem the best way of addressing this feature request.

-I do not know if it is possible but, it would be nice to have VM's IP and hostname(generally this is different then VMname) gathered from VMtools into Veeam One Monitor alarm mail bodies too.
As we have lots of locations and they all managed by one central operations center this will make our lifes easy. 3 of our admins do these tasks manually every day and they spend their 3-4 hours for just this functionality.

Yes, this can be done in our next major update.

[zciklacekic]

Thanks for detailed information.
Waiting for next update which includes these as you suggested.

[nmace]

Not sure if it has been mentioned elsewhere in the thread......

But I would really REALLY love the ability to have Veeam One monitor VMs for running services or process names. For instance, we have a VM running SQL Server I'll love to be able to define a rule that alerts when certain services on the SQL Server VM stop. Veeam One can currently query VMs for processes, etc as detailed in the "Processes" tab of a VM. If it could monitor and alert on services, I have an entire Nagios install I could pretty much do away with.

[Vitaliy S.]

Thanks for the feedback! Yes, I've seen this feature requested a couple of times. Seems like a good feature for our next updates.

[frankive]

Monitoring of the services inside the VMss will also replaces our other monitoring software. Email alerts or sms alerts (cloud service?) is a necessity to monitor servers. Customer is not too happy if an sql-service shuts down and we don't notice it at the same time (or before..)

[Vitaliy S.]

When we are talking about services monitoring, do you refer to monitoring just service state (for example, select service, provide local admin credentials to access the VM and then setup an alert)?

[frankive]

What I would like to see is that you can set an default admin credential which veeam One will try (like application processing in the backup) but also the ability to adjust for each VM like an exeption to the defautl credential.
Then Veeam One, in my dreams, eventually automatically read all the services and monitor its state f.ex each 30 seconds. If f.ex our DHCP-service in an VM goes down to "stopped" we then get an alert from Veeam One, either in the dashboard, email or eventually SMS (if we have an modem or can connect to a cloud service).
This is functionality we have today we our RMM tool called Gfi Max, but it is very expensive to use if we have a lot of VMs since it only focus on VMs and not host licensing. So if Veeam One would cover this we could throw our our other software and use Veeam for everyting

[Vitaliy S.]

Using Veeam everywhere is a good plan! Do you use any other functionality of GFI Max, for example, patch management or antivirus? Do you run agents inside the VMs?

[frankive]

We do in fact use the antivirusclient. It is ok and is enabled by a group policy for each customer or server.
We should have used the patch managemeny but we always forget it is there so we end up log in to the windows server. Not a big issue.
Yes, we do run agent inside every VM. The agent is pretty powerful, but again, too expensive in a virtual environment with a lots of VMs.

Another request though: We use AutoTab to automatically switch one monitor clients on our pc to show on a large monitor. Would be great if we could have typed in a Title-Window with the customers name at the top (perhaps just visible in full screen mode??) so we can see which customer who has that One Montor Client.

[Vitaliy S.]

Ok, thanks for clarifications. I fully understand your use case regarding agents and pricing for them, however currently we do not look into creating something similar to the RMM tool.

How do you connect to these Monitor Clients from your location? Do you use RDP or you have a Monitor Client installed in your location that switches between different Veeam ONE servers?

[frankive]

if you could monitor services inside VMs with email alerts, we are good to go

We multiple monitor client (virtualized app) that connect to our client server. 1 client for each server We have site-2-site VPN to all our larger customers.

[Vitaliy S.]

OK, seems like we are on the same page with this. BTW, do you have clients mostly running Hyper-V or VMware?

[frankive]

We are only using Hyper-V. Just working with smaller companies (1 VM to 20-30 VM) and we have only good experience with hyper-v.

[Vitaliy S.]

Ok, thanks for your valuable feedback once again!

[nmace]

When we are talking about services monitoring, do you refer to monitoring just service state (for example, select service, provide local admin credentials to access the VM and then setup an alert)?

A little late to updating the thread, but for me.....

We are 99% Windows VMs on vSphere. Like an earlier post described, giving a default set of credentials (with option to make a VM a 1 off with custom credentials), and then have it email/alarm on service state and ping time/latency of the VM would a wonderful first step.

Can you say, and I understand if you can't, when this functionality might be available? Are we talking version 9? Or would it have to wait until an update to version 9 or even version 10?

Thanks for listening to our feedback!

[Vitaliy S.]

It depends on the amount of dev resources available as well as currently prioritized feature set. Based on the research it seems like this feature should be possible to do, but can't say any ETA yet.