Feature Request - License Usage Report/Tracking

[n0creativity]

I searched through this forum and couldn't find an actual feature request for this, but if I missed it I am sorry.

Because Backup for Office365 (VBO) is licensed "per user", there absolutely needs to be a way to track how licenses are being consumed by the product.
Right now the license count appears to be a "black box" and even support can't provide me with details on WHY my license "usage" went up by 20 when we upgraded to 2.0 (case 03119427).
Their best "guess" is that somewhere a group is owned by a user that I have excluded and support has basically left it to me to figure it out... somehow.

Here's the very least that I would expect to be able to get from either the GUI or the PS module:
1. A list of users that are being counted towards the "current" total license usage
2. Detailed breakdown of each user and what exactly is consuming a license (aka Mailbox, OneDrive, Sharepoint, etc)
3. A projection of what the license usage count will be in 31+ days (or whatever the current "delay" is)
4. If I am "over" on my license count, how many days do I have left in my "grace period" (then I can use #3 to determine if I'll be within the limits again by then)

I'm sure others also have some great ideas on this topic. But PLEASE get these basic functions added ASAP.
With v1.5 we were keeping a spreadsheet to track our license usage... with the new complications that have been added with 2.0, I honestly don't know how we are going to track the license usage.

[Mike Resseler]

Hi David,

Good requests. I will take these on the table with the DEVs.

But let's look into this issue.

I am assuming that we are not talking about on-premises or hybrid?
1 user license counts for the users Mailbox, Archive, OneDrive for Business and Personal site. There are no other ways of consuming a license. So if you protect one of those 4 objects for a specific user, a license is used.

What you could do in PowerShell now is check the following:

Code: Select all

$org = Get-VBOOrganization -Name "nameoftheorg"
$users = Get-VBOOrganizationUser -Organization $org -Type user (this will actually put ALL users in that variable so you can use the where with .IsBackedUp -eq "True" to see only the protected users)

[n0creativity]

No hybrid or on-prem.
Using the commands you listed above and filtering for $_.IsBackedUp -eq 'True', I get the exact same number of results as the license usage count that VBO is reporting.
However, the results include our resource mailboxes (aka Room and Equipment mailboxes) which shouldn't be consuming a license, as far as I understand.
Take away those resource mailboxes and our license usage would look about right.

I've been told that support is researching the issue.

[Mike Resseler]

Indeed, resource mailboxes should not consume a license.

That might be a bug starting from 2.0 as I heard this twice already now. Let's hope they find a solution quickly. Keep us informed!

Cheers
Mike

[Tijz]

Hi, a small bumb to this thread.

We are setting this up multitenant, so I really need to be able to generate some sort of report to invoice our customers.
I used above powershell commands, but they still include the shared mailboxes as well.
At the moment I am testing with only one Organization. Veeam is reporting the correct number of licenses (44). But running above commands gives me a count of 56 because the shared mailboxes are counted as well. How could we get a count for the licenses used per organization?

-Tijs

[Polina]

Hi Tijs,

First, there's some good news: the next product version will offer license count tracking out-of-the-box.

As of now, if you run the above script with the "-Type User" parameter, it will give you the list of both users and resource mailboxes protected (56 instead of 44 in your case). You can filter resource mailboxes from the results by adding a second parameter to exclude their emails (i.e. "-Type User | where {$_.IsBackedUp -eq $True -and $_.username -ne $exclude}", where $exclude=Get-Content -Path C:\Folder\your resource mailboxes emails to exclude.txt).

Hope this helps..

[Tijz]

Well, it's good news that this will be possible in the next release. Any idea when the next version will be released? Q1 2019?

If I understand your current solution correctly, I need to manually create and maintain a file with all resource mailboxes of all our customers. That's no solution, I can manually report on the licenses right now, we need an automated solution.

[Tijz]

I found what I need is already possible. I just need a correct count right now. It turns out that's possible by querying the ".LicensingOptions" property of the Veeam.Archiver.PowerShell.Model.VBOOffice365Organization class.

Code: Select all

$org = Get-VBOOrganization -Name "orgname.onmicrosoft.com" 

$org.LicensingOptions

                  LicensedUsersCount                                             TrialUsersCount
                  ------------------                                             ---------------
                                  44                                                           2

Not exactly sure what the "TrialUsersCount" stands for though

[Polina]

Hi Mattijs,

Sorry, but I cannot share any release ETA yet.

In your licensing count, "TrialUsersCount" stands for the temporarily assigned licenses. If a user was first backed up after the 1st of every month, it would get a "trial" license until the 1st day of the next month. This is relevant to the Rental licensing model.

Also, a small addition to my previous comment - to minimize manual work for getting the list of your customer's resource mailboxes you can use O365 cmdlets, such as "$rooms=Get-Mailbox -RecipientTypeDetails RoomMailbox" and "$eq=Get-Mailbox -RecipientTypeDetails EquipmentMailbox". Of course, this is only needed in case you would like to get the entire list of licensed users.

Thanks!