Job History Time Line View (Feature Request)

[paul.barrett]

Hi,

I've just moved our Veeam install up to version 6, now we have a central management console with two proxies (in separate data centres), I've moved our jobs to better select the VMs by function rather than site. This has helped with de-dup and makes more sense to the way we organise our VMs.

What would be really helpful would be a graphical time line view that shows when each job ran and when each of the proxies were in use. This would allow our admins to easily identify when overlaps are occurring and adjust timings and the order of the VMs in the jobs to better use the two proxies and the time available. It would also show up any jobs that took longer than expected.
I'm thinking similar to the time line used in the RedGate SQL Backup product. http://www.red-gate.com/supportcenter/c ... UITimeLine

Is this something others would find useful as well? Is it something that Veeam would be consider adding to a future release?

Thanks
Paul

[foggy]

Paul, thanks for the feedback, much appreciated!

[averylarry]

I suppose this would probably go under "bells and whistles". I'd like to have a calendar view for jobs scheduled. For me, I'd like it to be in the Enterprise Manager, where you can just select a calendar view -- and it'll show the history of what happened and the future of what is scheduled (for all jobs or maybe select which jobs/backup servers etc.). I just had an instance today where I was creating a new offsite replication and I wanted to ensure that no other jobs were scheduled at the same time. I had to open each job in the backup console and look at its schedule.


I'd be OK with just the calendar view. I suppose others might like to be able to schedule (add, modify, exclude single instances) directly from a view like this (but then again, complex scheduling has been a recurring request in general for a long time).

[joachim123]

Hi,

we backup about 50 machines to an emc datadomain storage and for offsite storage we transfer these backups again to tape in certain intarvalls.
For better planning,optimizing the slots for the backups it would be an great help if it would be possible to display the backups in an timetable.
I know that we can enter all the data in some gantchart tool, but would be great if there would be the possisibilty to create such an timetable automatically from logs.
Has anybody an idea how to do that ?
We use veeam 7.

Thanks a lot.

Best Regards
Joachim

[veremin]

Also, you can take a look at VeemOne v7 with its predefined report called “Protected VMs Job Schedule” and see whether it meets your expectations or not. Thanks.

[scott.edwards]

Would it be possible to view the backup schedule in a calendar view within Veeam? I have not been able to locate this feature or report. A graphical representation of the jobs in a calendar view would be very helpful in planning out jobs (daily, weekly, monthly etc.)

[Shestakov]

Hello Scott,
Absolutely, it`s on our radar and we are planning to make it as a report and add it to Veeam One.
Thank you for the feedback!

[scott.edwards]

While that will be nice, VeeamONE is an additional product which costs $$ and I believe the free version expires after 90 days and would be operating with reduced functionality so the report could be removed. This was part of Symantec Backup Exec 5-6 years ago. When viewing the scheduled jobs it could be done as a list or as a calendar view (day, week, month, year). I hate to mention the previous solution but this was there and a quick visual check of jobs scheduled, overlap and an easy way to look for when to add another job.

[Shestakov]

Scott,
For a number of our clients calendar view will not be sufficient. So we decided to make a flexible, fully fledged report.
Smaller version, like calendar view, can also be implemented in Veeam B&R.
We will definitely take your feedback into account, thanks again.

[mhavens]

I would like to ditto this request for Backup&Replication. We have other SQL backup utilities which have great calendar views, where you can look forward to see how jobs are scheduled, and look backward to see how long jobs actually ran, and if there were any collisions. I'd like a graphical representation in calendar view to analyze possible collisions of incremental jobs with synthetic fulls, so I can make sure the fulls have plenty of time to complete without resource contention of the other jobs.

I'd also like a way to quickly see what day(s) I've scheduled synthetic fulls to run without having to open each job and go into the Storage tab, Advanced, etc. Thanks.

[Shestakov]

Hello Mark,
Thank you for a comprehensive clear feedback!

We have other SQL backup utilities which have great calendar views

Could you give some examples of the utilities you are using? Thanks!

[mhavens]

For SQL backups, we use RedGate SQL Backup Pro http://www.red-gate.com/products/dba/sql-backup/
And there's a utility to monitor SQL jobs called SQLSentry that does great job scheduling and history graphically.
http://www.sqlsentry.com/products/event ... management

[Shestakov]

Thank you, Mark.
I appreciate your input!

[Marc_Punte]

I know it’s a lot of work, but I think more people like me would appreciate this feature.
I would like a calendar-like view where you can see when a job started, and how long it ran.
Why? We submit jobs not at a specific time but we chain them one after the other.
Sometimes it takes longer than expected for all the jobs to finish, and it's a puzzle to find what job in the chain took so much time.
So it would be great to have an 'Outlook calendar' kind of screen where you can see wat has run last night, and a prediction of what will run in the near future.
You have all the data at hand, I just want to see it all together in one graphic summary.

[PTide]

Hi,

Veeam ONE contains various reports that can provide you with a complete summary of your backup infrstructure. For example VB&R dashboard and Backup Jobs Historical information

Thank you.

[Shestakov]

Hi Marc,

We submit jobs not at a specific time but we chain them one after the other.

That`s not a recommended approach, by the way and looks like you faced its downside. It`s better to schedule the jobs run and leverage parallel processing.
And for jobs monitoring, I`d suggest to take a look at Veeam ONE as Pavel mentioned above.
Thanks!

[Roberto]

It would be very useful to have on Veeam B&R Management Interface a "tree visualization" of dependent scheduled task to see graphically the scheduled sequence dependency.It would be very useful also a warning to avoid to disable dependent jobs when intermediate jobs are disabled (sometimes temporarily), so other dependent Jobs are execute or if removed permanently the intermediate jobs the chain modified to avoid not executing jobs silently (discovering too late - ie if the job is a Replication, after many time replication data can be large).
If there are many jobs with schedules interdependent, any changes verification can be a pain without this graphical visualization.

[PTide]

Hi,

It would be very useful to have on Veeam B&R Management Interface a "tree visualization" of dependent scheduled task to see graphically the scheduled sequence dependency

Are you referring to chained jobs or to jobs like backup copy/replica from backup? If the fromer then please keep in mind that it's not a recommended approach and should be avoid whenever possible.

[ejenner]

I don't know if the software already does this, but a schedule grid would be handy.

A graphical overview of how jobs are scheduled so you can see at a glance where you are scheduling most jobs. It can help in terms of planning when to schedule other jobs.

Could also provide a view based on performance data so you know when your system is heavily loaded. That could be another input for making a decision about when to schedule jobs.

[foggy]

Hi EJ, thanks for the request. We're actually working on something like that in Veeam ONE already.

[Shestakov]

Foggy is right, we are working on that in Veeam ONE.

Could also provide a view based on performance data so you know when your system is heavily loaded. That could be another input for making a decision about when to schedule jobs.

Even now you can check proxy CPU/Memory load and repository IO in Veeam ONE. Along with bottleneck statistics in VBR it helps understand if you need to reschedule jobs.
Thanks!

[ejenner]

We won't be installing Veeam One because it's a separate license which I won't be able to purchase.

[Shestakov]

Got it. You may try it for free with trial license if that's an option for you.

[ejenner]

Already tried it. It was alright.

[Gostev]

We won't be installing Veeam One because it's a separate license which I won't be able to purchase.

You should not buy it separate, but rather upgrade your Veeam Backup & Replication to Suite - this way Veeam ONE is significantly cheaper than standalone.

[MariusN]

@Gostev: there should be a possibility to have a Backup Dashboard with history Information and runtimes for a specified interval WITHOUT using another application like Veeam ONE or the need to upgrade to availability Suite. Maybe a Point to think about to improve B&R as product.

[ejenner]

Discussed this with our supplier yesterday and came to the conclusion that Veeam One would be useful in a very large environment. We're upper medium size of enterprise but not so big that we don't know when our virtual environments are going to run out of resources and that sort of stuff Veeam One reports on. I can imagine Veeam One being great if you've got a 1000 VMs to report on and you want some broad pointers where to look for potential problems with your setup. In our case, when I tried it, the amount of configuration it would have required to stop reporting false positives would take longer than looking directly at the objects being reported on for a live view.

[Shestakov]

EJ, what's the size of your infrastructure?
By the way, could you point out reports where you got false positives, so we can work on them?
Thanks!

[ejenner]

I uninstalled Veeam One after the trial ended. We have aprox 150 to 200 servers, that figure changes as we're putting in new ones and removing old ones.

[simon_jackson]

Hi,

I've recently had to witness someone export all job histories using powershell, filter the job type, and then output to excel, manipulate the data manually, re-format stuff and remove columns.. all to create a calendar-style view, that Outlook could do automatically in seconds.

Can we publish all job history, for the job history period defined system wide, in the form of an ICAL file?

Make the Category of the entry match the job status (ERROR, WARN, SUCCESS etc). This should nicely colour-code them in a calendar view.

Can we prefix the event name with the job-type?
EG:

• Start: <SESSION_START>
  End:Monday <SESSION_END>
  Name:

BACKUP COPY: <JOB NAME>
Category: <JOB STATUS>

Publishing could be either (publish each event to a 3rd party service, say MS exchange) or, allow the client to pull off a https link directly from the Veeam Server, DNS, firewall etc all permitting.

Welcome your thoughts.

Thanks,