Veeam ONE vNEXT feedback/wishlist

[ajjacksonctct]

Thank you! This works great in reports. I guess the next question would be can I have this column show up under workspace in Business View?

[Shestakov]

Thanks for the feedback!

[brian.nielsen]

Hi,

It will be much appriciated if VeeamONE would support the use of Managed Service Accounts from a MS Active Directory.
As it is now you can only select ordinary users with fixed passwords to run the service during the installation.

Domain policy requires that all services are run with a secure Managed Service Account so for now we have a licens for VeeamONE but we can use it due to the lack of support of MSA's and a MSA has been around since Windows Server 2008 so was a bit suppriced that Veeam don't support that.

[Vitaliy S.]

Hi Brian, logged as a feature request for our next versions. Thanks!

[kkuszek]

I would love to see VeeamOne flesh out their Visio exports. It feels like a third party plugin or afterthought right now with just the 1 which is also a bit confusing (I had to open a ticket because I didn't know that one visio would spawn off other ones if you clicked the virtual infrastrucutre info over hover pop. There are no instructions for this not even a text line in the generated file which makes it pretty non-intuitive).

Outside of VeeamOne I would say Visio charts are the collective end state for a lot of documentation & presentation material. Make it a forethought to include, not an after thought and make more than 1 visio export.

[kkuszek]

Another thought as well: I would like to see more intelligence around alarm suppression as VeeamOne synergizes with B&R. I would rather see v1 look at trending and have active communication between it and the B&R server to know a task is coming/in process and intelligently use that to determine if a notification should go out instead of just blacking it out.

Example: B&R has an active job and creates a snapshot. Because it's in progress and is streaming data over a specified average threshold to prove it's actually happening v1 will ignore the snapshot creation/age warning e-mails. it knows they should be there. If B&R job freezes and stops providing data to v1 or shows 0kb average over say 10 minutes THEN flag for notify)

[Shestakov]

I would love to see VeeamOne flesh out their Visio exports. It feels like a third party plugin or afterthought right now with just the 1 which is also a bit confusing (I had to open a ticket because I didn't know that one visio would spawn off other ones if you clicked the virtual infrastrucutre info over hover pop. There are no instructions for this not even a text line in the generated file which makes it pretty non-intuitive).

Outside of VeeamOne I would say Visio charts are the collective end state for a lot of documentation & presentation material. Make it a forethought to include, not an after thought and make more than 1 visio export.

Hello Kurt,
What do have a plan to increase number of Visio reports.
What kind of Visio reports would you like to have?
Thanks!

[kkuszek]

Haha I should have known you would ask!

I can't think of any directly on the spot here but I am sure as I run through reports if I thought of it as "how would this look in visio?" things could get interesting.

Not everything formats well into visio and really most won't... but I guarantee more could. I think the best ways to shine are topographical view representations of statistics. things like network maps, vm maps, etc. which are infrastructure view but maybe I just want to make a visual representation of all my machines in the green vs in the red for some specific topic I want to fund?

[Shestakov]

Yeah, that`s a pretty straightforward question
Topology overview does make sense, that`s the one we have and another one which also sounds clear and useful is backup infrastructure Visio representation.
Could you describe what you meant by "VM maps"?

[kkuszek]

Well lets say for example I want to upgrade all my servers from 2008 to 2012r2 for some new security feature or functionality. I would go to VeeamOne to generate a visio chart that shows all my VM's and maybe it could represent different guest OS's as a different color, or maybe all OS's under version x as red and all above as green. I would take that print out to say "look at this. this is everything we have. See all the red? Those are all machines we run without x. I need justification for my project"

Visio charts are a great way to provide intuitive approachable visuals to management. The idea is that I could take some gathered statistic or measure and graphically represent it in a way management might understand. Spreadsheets aren't really read by executives nor should they be. This gets right to the point. "Wow look at all those red datastores. I guess we DO need to order some spindles".

[Shestakov]

I see your point.
For instance there is a VM Configuration Report which shows Guest OS distribution over the infrastructure and it contains the pie chart in Summary.
Is it not enough to show or your management doesn`t pay attention to the pie chart, but if there are xx% of red colored VMs(VM icons) it will change their behavior?
Is it enough to change/improve graphical representation of current reports? I`m just curious how Visio can help here.

[kkuszek]

That was really more of a spitball off the cuff idea than a specific need I have today. I was trying to think of where it might be a good fit. I know there were a few times where I thought "I wish that was Visio" I am just struggling to remember the specific instances.

Maybe the best place to start would be to make the existing export a lot more flexible other than a single checkbox to include vm's or not? Options such as exclude templates, powered off machines, machines matching xyz. include folders, show machines with warnings, machines that are part of a tape backup job/cloud backup/drs site etc.?
arrange or group by datastore/alphabetic order/size/memory/etc?

[Shestakov]

That`s all is currently achievable with Business View groups.

There are predefined ones with rules of specific SLAs / Storage types / Last Backup Days etc.
You may also create custom groups with such rules as Guest OS / Power state / vCPU count etc.

And in the reports you can choose either by Virtual Infrastructure Scope or by Business View object(s).

If you miss an option in any report, let me know with a specific example.

[kkuszek]

Yes,
And they might be. That still doesn't expand off the above need though. I might simply just want a Visio diagram printed and on the wall to show a visual state of what will exist in a disaster recovery scenario, or maybe I want a Visio print out of everything we have but I don't want to cloud that with test machines, templates, and powered off not in use machines. This could be a laminated wall chart or visual for a meeting.

Unless I missed something in translation here and you are telling me I can generate all of that but then export the results to a Visio diagram?

I have a network map. I want a VM map I can put next to it that looks like it belongs and carries relevant information. Maybe I want to break it out to network membership like dmz/not dmz and still use above criteria, or dressed up by folder sorting, or all of the above. I could generate and maintain it manually but that's not the same.

[Shestakov]

Unless I missed something in translation here and you are telling me I can generate all of that but then export the results to a Visio diagram?

All reports can be saved in PDF/Excel/Word formats, no .vsd
Technically we can work on it and implement all these options if we see how it help you in particular use cases where current version doesn`t work.

Maybe I want to break it out to network membership like dmz/not dmz and still use above criteria, or dressed up by folder sorting, or all of the above. I could generate and maintain it manually but that's not the same.

You can use Business View Groups as I wrote above.

[Vitaliy S.]

Another thought as well: I would like to see more intelligence around alarm suppression as VeeamOne synergizes with B&R. I would rather see v1 look at trending and have active communication between it and the B&R server to know a task is coming/in process and intelligently use that to determine if a notification should go out instead of just blacking it out.

Example: B&R has an active job and creates a snapshot. Because it's in progress and is streaming data over a specified average threshold to prove it's actually happening v1 will ignore the snapshot creation/age warning e-mails. it knows they should be there. If B&R job freezes and stops providing data to v1 or shows 0kb average over say 10 minutes THEN flag for notify)

Hmm...but it is already available, all Veeam backup snapshots are not accounted in alarms detection logic while alarm is running. Moreover, for all other alarms you have an option to suppress alarms during Veeam backup job activity. Let me know if I'm missing anything.

[kkuszek]

Hmm...but it is already available, all Veeam backup snapshots are not accounted in alarms detection logic while alarm is running. Moreover, for all other alarms you have an option to suppress alarms during Veeam backup job activity. Let me know if I'm missing anything.

Hello Vitaliy,
Yes there are options to suppress specific alarms during veeam backup activity. This has some shortfalls though:
1. it is cumbersome to implement across all triggered alarms during backup activity. There are many alarms and it's set 1 by 1 individually.

2. A global alarm suppression would not work well however. We don't want to stop all alarms during my entire evening window, only ones likely/typically triggered during backups. This is where I was thinking some logic could be performed and some level of integration. Example: don't just detect B&R jobs but share the job contents such as machines being backed up at this time, associated datastores with those machines/current backup targets. This could intelligently filter and say only suppress alarms matching current/recent activity criteria. Suppression is cumbersome brute force right now.

[kkuszek]

Along the same thought process In implementation I find VeeamOne very noisy and I also find myself ignoring the alerts more often than I should because of the frequency of noise.
Another thought is the lack of granularity in the global notification policy. I think it would be nice to set a buffer policy to criticality. I see alert messages that are triggered/resolved back to back. If I could define an acceptable time policy of say, 3 or 4 minutes where a triggered alarm that is subsequently resolved will not then generate an e-mail then I think I could cut down significantly on the noise. A 3 minute delay for me is not critical in my environment. I can specify a periodic summary for other non mission critical notifications but that's not really noise suppression. This way I can better pay attention to alerts that matter and adding a delay can increase my responsiveness to real issues.

[Vitaliy S.]

1. it is cumbersome to implement across all triggered alarms during backup activity. There are many alarms and it's set 1 by 1 individually.

You should be able to select all alarms at a time (via CTRL+A) and then adjust this common setting for all alarms.

2. A global alarm suppression would not work well however. We don't want to stop all alarms during my entire evening window, only ones likely/typically triggered during backups. This is where I was thinking some logic could be performed and some level of integration. Example: don't just detect B&R jobs but share the job contents such as machines being backed up at this time, associated datastores with those machines/current backup targets. This could intelligently filter and say only suppress alarms matching current/recent activity criteria. Suppression is cumbersome brute force right now.

Yes, makes sense. We can try to automatically suppress all VM specific alarms during backup job activity. Nikita, can you please discuss it with the devs?

Along the same thought process In implementation I find VeeamOne very noisy and I also find myself ignoring the alerts more often than I should because of the frequency of noise.

What are the most "nosiest" alarms in your infrastructure?

Another thought is the lack of granularity in the global notification policy. I think it would be nice to set a buffer policy to criticality. I see alert messages that are triggered/resolved back to back. If I could define an acceptable time policy of say, 3 or 4 minutes where a triggered alarm that is subsequently resolved will not then generate an e-mail then I think I could cut down significantly on the noise. A 3 minute delay for me is not critical in my environment. I can specify a periodic summary for other non mission critical notifications but that's not really noise suppression. This way I can better pay attention to alerts that matter and adding a delay can increase my responsiveness to real issues.

Good suggestion!

[kkuszek]

For me the alarm I see the most is VM total disk latency during the backup window. We run shift work so I don't have a 24x7 operation and can afford to just let veeam aggressively hit the datastore during my backup window.

Addendum to above as well:
if there is intelligent notification filtering and granular cross communication between vone/b&r then make sure any suppressions are lifted on job completion. i.e. don't give me a snapshot age error during the job, but if the job completes & B&R goes idle but didn't clean up the snapshot it created, vone should then send notification having seen the snapshot created with the job but later not cleared correctly. It could be a watchdog for interrupted/stopped B&R processes when things go wrong.

[kkuszek]

I was just looking at another issue on site and had a thought. Veeam B&R has powershell cmdlets, but I don't see anything for VeeamOne?
I was googling to see if I could make a generic powershell script for a windows service or a specific application error that would send an alert to VeeamOne to be logged & distributed accordingly... but I saw nothing on it. Something that I could deploy to all of my VM's to monitor critical services & applications would enrich the flexibility.

[Shestakov]

My 2 cents.
Some suggestions make sense as Vitaliy has mentioned above, but mostly it`s achievable in the current configuration.

1. it is cumbersome to implement across all triggered alarms during backup activity. There are many alarms and it's set 1 by 1 individually.

You can use Ctrl+click to choose several alarms and make add a suppression rule for several alarms at once.

It could be a watchdog for interrupted/stopped B&R processes when things go wrong.

It works like that already. There is a predefined Backup Job State Alarm

[Vitaliy S.]

. i.e. don't give me a snapshot age error during the job, but if the job completes & B&R goes idle but didn't clean up the snapshot it created, vone should then send notification having seen the snapshot created with the job but later not cleared correctly.

Yes, good use case and we have a predefined alarm for this. Check out this rule > Orphaned Veeam Backup & Replication snapshot has been detected

Also snapshots created by Veeam Backup & Replication should not be accounted in VM snapshot age/size alarm while the backup job is running.

I was just looking at another issue on site and had a thought. Veeam B&R has powershell cmdlets, but I don't see anything for VeeamOne?
I was googling to see if I could make a generic powershell script for a windows service or a specific application error that would send an alert to VeeamOne to be logged & distributed accordingly... but I saw nothing on it. Something that I could deploy to all of my VM's to monitor critical services & applications would enrich the flexibility.

Yes, you're right. Currently, Veeam ONE does not have services or in-guest applications monitoring capabilities. Thanks for the FR!

[tntteam]

Hi there,

Already discussed, but having the ability to dispatch alarm email on different email recepient based on VM's group is a mandatory functionnality for us.

Because we manage hundred of servers and the most important thing for a monitoring solution is to send the least messages possible.
Receiving too much email = administrators put these emails in trash and dont look at them.

And as you already guessed, some admins manage specific servers and don't want to receive alarms about servers they don't manage.

[Shestakov]

Hi tntteam,
You are right, we`ve received some alike requests and started working on the feature. Could you clarify your use case a bit?
Do you want to have an option to assign particular alarms based on Business View groups or an option of some general rule?

[tntteam]

Hi,

Let's just say the business view groups should be affected a contact email, and in alarm you should be abble to add a recepient "send to business view groups email contact".
I wrote about it here : veeam-one-f28/contact-groups-based-on-b ... ml#p179186

I can think of it for us, divided in 3 teams to manage different VMs, but I think we can find other usecases, like you are a reseller of VMs, you want customer to also receive alarms about their VMs, but don't want to bother them with VMs of others customers.

Sorry my english sux a lot

[Shestakov]

Yeah, I remember that request in the linked post.
The problem assigning alarms to BV groups is the fact some of them are dynamic.
Thanks for the feedback! We will discuss it with the dev team once again.

[lando_uk]

I have a request (at least I don't think its currently available...)

A proper syslog server, so I can send all my esxi logs to the Veeam One server?

[Vitaliy S.]

Yes, it''s not available. Can you please clarify what data are you mostly monitoring via syslog?

[lando_uk]

Yes, it''s not available. Can you please clarify what data are you mostly monitoring via syslog?

All host logs, rather than keeping them local or on a shared datastore.

https://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/micro ... Id=2003322

Syslog.global.logHost
A comma-delimited list of remote servers where logs are sent using the syslog protocol. If the logHost field is blank, no logs are forwarded. Include the protocol and port, similar to tcp://hostname:514 or udp://hostname:514

I think vRealize Log Insight does it.
http://www.vmware.com/uk/products/vreal ... tures.html