Veeam ONE vNEXT feedback/wishlist

[Yuki]

1) Would love to see ONE changed from being locked to sockets as that licensing schema makes no sense for a monitoring system

2) add capability to monitor CIFS, NFS shares and SNMP MIBs so NAS and Windows/Linux systems installed on the actual hardware (not virtual) can be monitored.

Here is my issue - monitoring is not the same as backing up. Where it makes sense to charge per socket for backup product because the software protects the server, in case of monitoring we also want to monitor systems that are not protected. Some of them are small systems such as phone voicemail servers, management stations etc running on old hardware not considered critical or on systems provided by other vendors.

We want to use ONE across our clients but paying $450 per socket to monitor a $500 computer used to manage systems or cover the vendor provided phone server installed on hardware kills this idea. In most cases, destination for Veeam B&R is a NAS, but we can't monitor it effectively with ONE.

[Vitaliy S.]

Hi Yuki,

Hmm...thanks for your thoughts, much appreciated. Have you considered using free edition of Veeam ONE for systems that are not mission-critical?

Thanks!

[Yuki]

We did, but the limitations of the free version make it a lot less useful (no projections, data only for last 7 days, only 1 custom report, ). The only reason we need/want Veeam ONE is for capacity planning/projections graphs for management. We already have a monitoring systems in place based on Zabbix, but it doesn't generate pretty graphs or provide projections the way ONE does. And that is what execs want to look at.

In fact, client that wants this has no problems paying for the licenses if they did everything they wanted - monitoring NAS and non-virtual systems. It's not that non-virtualized systems are not mission critical, but that we have limited ability to change how they are setup and operating. When a vendor comes in and sets up a system, we don't always get a choice to say that everything must be virtual (like in case with phone or security systems that rely on access to specific hardware). So we would need ability to add vCenter and Veeam B&R to ONE (already there) and then standalone virtual/non-virtual vendor provided systems as well as monitor NAS devices.

For example - some of our systems are 40 core servers doing data crunching on DNA. These servers have very little RAM/HD space, but have 4 x 10 core processors. Client has stacks of these systems...If they wanted to cover them with Veeam ONE -it would cost 4x $450 per each. Multiply that by 20-40 systems and you see how per socket licensing makes very little sense when all these servers run is a single Linux instance directly on hardware that is crunching data.

If I may, i would suggest licensing per host ($450) with NAS monitoring for free or at lower price since ($50-100) or introduce enterprise license ($5,000 to cover 1-20 systems, $25,000 20-40 systems, or some similar scale)



Also a few questions:
1) client is about to order a SAN system. It is my misunderstanding that ONE can only monitor space assigned to virtualization layer on systems exposed to Hyper-v/vCenter/Veeam B&R and can't monitor SAN directly. So if we have 20TB SAN, 10TB of which is allocated in LUNs to the virtual servers (and out of the assigned space we are only using 5TB) - then we will see only 10 TB of total space with 5TB used in the reports, but not entire 20TB. Is that correct?

2) if they buy Veeam ONE separately from B&R, will they be able to add B&R+vCenter to ONE without limitation of the B&R license? Currently, license that comes with B&R limits monitored systems to what B&R is licensed to protect.

[Vitaliy S.]

Thanks for the feedback!

1. Yes, that's correct.
2. You need to license the same number of sockets (or more) that you have licensed for Veeam B&R, basically that is why Veeam Backup Management Suite was introduced to the community.

[jevontane]

Hi, awesome product! Would really like to see the following implemented at some point.

1. Audible alerts from the Veeam ONE Monitor Client – We run this client to show its dashboards on wall mounted TVs for all of the engineers to see at a glance the health status of our virtual environment. To my knowledge there is no way to make Veeam ONE play a sound if an alarm is triggered so that these engineers can be alerted and if need be further investigate the issue. I have used many dashboard monitoring systems over the years and this has always been a feature and is widely used. Setting up an email client to play a sound when an email alert isn't the best of workarounds. What if the email system that Veeam ONE is monitoring breaks?
2. The Veeam ONE Monitor Client requires a workaround (not a very good one as it is very insecure) if you need to connect it to a Veeam ONE Server on a different Active Directory domain than the PC you are running the client on. The client should have a place where you can specify domain and username credentials for connecting to the Veeam Server and authenticate based on that.

My 2 cents worth.

Jevon.

[Vitaliy S.]

Hi Jevon,

First of all thanks for the feedback! Secondly, regarding creating audible alerts, you can already do this via post-alarm script. Please take a look at this topic for further reading: Custom Alerts

Thanks!

[veremin]

Audible alerts from the Veeam ONE Monitor Client

In fact, even today you can achieve what you’re after.

In order to do it:

1) Go to the Alarm Management -> Right-click a required alarm -> Edit -> Actions -> Run script -> Specify location of a batch-file, as well as, a parameter that you want to pass. For instance: C:\temp\test.bat %5 (%5 – alarm status).

2) Create two sound samples (Warning.mp3, Error.mp3) and put them into required directory (C:\temp\sounds, for example) .

3) Finally, something like this should be in the test.bat file body:

Code: Select all

if %1 == "Warning" (start C:\Temp\Sounds\Warning.mp3)
if %1 == "Error" (start C:\Temp\Sounds\Error.mp3)

Hope this helps.
Thanks.

[jevontane]

Thanks Vitaliy S and v.Eremin for your quick reply. I have actually already tried this but the sound does not play at the client running Veeam ONE Monitor Client - doesn't your suggestions just run a script on the Veeam ONE server itself? I've created a directory and bat file that calls an exe to play a wav file (c:\temp\playalert.bat) and to be sure, have these exact same directories/files on both the Veeam ONE server and the Veeam ONE Monitor Client PC. Running the bat file manually plays the alert sound fine.

Am I doing something wrong? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Jevon.

[Vitaliy S.]

You're right. All post-alarm scripts are triggered on the Veeam ONE Server. Playing the sound file on the remote machine requires some kind of remoting I guess.

[SimonEa]

Can future releases of VeeamOne support a "hook in" to Orchestrator in a similar way vCOPS does?

[Vitaliy S.]

Hi Simon, can you please provide a bit more information on what you're looking for in terms of this "hook in"?

[SimonEa]

Orchestrator has work flows for all manner of tasks. (eg provisioning more resources to a VM)

vCOPS can trigger said workflows based on given events you can define.

Having VeeamOne able to trigger a workflow based on any given condition would be great!

(PS if this is something that is already supported then wow!)

[Vitaliy S.]

Hi Simon,

It is not supported natively, however you can create a post-alarm action script that will talk to your Orchestrator installation (via PS or smth else) and then trigger the desired set of tasks.

Thanks for the feedback!

[Kyrikaze]

Hi,

I really Appreciate Veeam One 6.5 !
But something for me is missing ;(
I Wish I'll be able one day ton 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 and/or process would be a really really really good new feature !!
With this, I'll be able to use only Veeam Monitor to check all my "Infrastructure Health", without having to use multiple servers as Nagios, or Zabbix.
They are good too, but I using it only to monitor process and services.

So, I hope one day, and why not in the futur Veeam One V7 realease, my whish will become real

[Kyrikaze]

I forgot one thing !
I saw that in Veeam Backup & Replication V7, we'll be able to access directly to the Veeam Backup information and configuration through a plug-in added directly in our Vsphere Client.
Why not extend this possibility to Veeam One ?

As You see through my to wish :

• Monitor services and process (by creating alert and notifications based on the status of those services and process)
• Add a plug-in similar to one coming for Veeam Backup & Replication in the next release

My only wish is to have only one access point to manage, backup, and monitor my Infrastruture

[Vitaliy S.]

Hello, thanks for your feature requests, make total sense to me, so I will put them into our feature tracking system.

[Sharky]

Hi Vitaliy.

I would like to have fallowing funtions:

- Veeam Monitoring, a more customizable email notification template, to show more information’s, like the notes under VSphere guest information (selectable variables). Where, at the same location where the object information’s are, if you select html email notification
- Veeam Monitoring, on the summary tab, the VSphere guest notes which have been removed since Veeam Monitor v5, was a good information.

Would be great

Thx
Mitch

[ptmartin]

I would like to monitor my cloud environment with Veeam ONE

[ptmartin]

It would also be great to see patch levels on hosts and maybe even have the ability to apply patches to VMs and/or hosts ... is that possible?

[veremin]

I would like to monitor my cloud environment with Veeam ONE

If you’re using vCD as your cloud solution, don’t miss the upcoming version of VeeamOne which will provide monitoring system for such environments.

Thanks.

[Vitaliy S.]

Hi Mitch,

1. Can you please tell me what parameters you would like to add to existing variables list?
2. We have this information on the VMs tab for each VM container, but thanks for the feedback!

Thanks!

[Vitaliy S.]

Hey Paul!

1. What cloud do you use in your VI?
2. Everything is possible in the software world Let me check if it is possible to collect patch level info through existing VMware API calls.

Thanks for the feedback!

[ptmartin]

Hey Vitaly!
I am using S3 for storage and dabbling with the C2 idea for compute in a DR situation ... Azure is looking very compelling these days though with their free trial offer (aka.ms/IaaS).

Paul

[Vitaliy S.]

Got it, thanks!

[Sharky]

Hi Mitch,

1. Can you please tell me what parameters you would like to add to existing variables list?!

Informations, which are entred under "notes" in VSphere Guets/Summery tab/Annotations. Idea is to show a little bit more informations about the VM guest in notification mail from Veeam Monitor.


Thanks

[jregel]

Having recently deployed Veeam ONE v7, I'd like to see the following reports added to the product:

vCloud Director Organisation VDC utilisation/capacity report

I'd like to be able to generate a report against a vCD organisation that reports on the CPU, memory and storage utilisation out of the total capacity assigned to the Org VDC(s), along with capacity planning trends for these Org VDCs.

It would be useful to be able to select the organisation, then one, multiple or all Org VDCs associated with that organisation.

This could then be scheduled to be emailed to customers so that they can see how much remaining capacity they have in their Org VDC and when they need to purchase more capacity.


Chargeback/Showback reporting for VMs

Similar to the "Backup Billing" report, we would like to be able to generate chargeback/showback reports for VM utilisation.

We would like to be able to assign a cost value to CPU/Memory (on a per-cluster basis) and Storage (on a per-datastore or datastore cluster basis (so we can assign different values to SSD/SAS/SATA tiers)). It would need to enable us to define the CPU/Memory parameters such as 1 vCPU/2GB RAM.

In addition to CPU/Memory and Storage, it would be very useful to be able to assign a cost against a property in vSphere so we could assign a cost based on OS type and custom fields (e.g., Is backed up, Is replicated etc.).

The ability to select VMs based on Business View parameters (so we can group based on owning Business Unit) would be extremely useful, or alternatively by selecting a folder within the vSphere hierarchy.

If any of these are already possible and I've just missed them, please point me in the right direction!

Thanks

[Vitaliy S.]

Julian, you can already generate performance reports for org VDC, but adding trends of resource usage is a good suggestion, so thanks for the feedback!

[stingray75]

We would like chargeback/showback reporting also, and like the idea of assigning a cost against a property. We must be able to bill again business view property, such as by business line.

For Veeam Monitor, I'd like the ability for operators to acknowledge alarms, as we can do in vCenter. Then we can tell whether someone is aware of or is working on the issue. If you could add a comment to the acknowledgement it would be even better, eg high CPU this week due to data load.

[Vitaliy S.]

Matthew, thanks for the feedback, much appreciated. Funny you should say that as we had this exact conversation (about alarms new state - acknowledged) with our dev team recently.

[stingray75]

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. 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.