SOX Backup Reporting per Virtual Machine

[dinger76]

I've noticed that there have been a couple of posts in the past about wanting useful reports to be created for Veeam Backup & Replication to be used for backup checks. I had a friendly chat with a Veeam person over a year ago about a similar thing.
The situation we have, is that we have a SOX auditing requirement to provide a weekly email showing the success or failure of each of our over 250 virtual machines being backed up with Veeam.
At present we perform manual daily checks of these machines using the Veeam Enterprise Manager or the Veeam Console, we record these into a Sharepoint survey and then produce a printed excel spreadsheet at the end of the week for the SOX audit... as you can imagine this is very time consuming.

I'm happy to flirt with Powershell to get to the result that is required but at the moment, I'm a little lost as to where to start. I'm also surprised that there isn't a report in one of the pieces of Veeam software that will provide a weekly report listing the vm name with success, warning or failure on each of the days of the week.

Please help to point me in the right direction.

Thanks

[Gostev]

Hi Chris, can you please clarify what should this report reflect in case if a VM was backed up more than once on the given day? It is common that our customers backup VMs more often than daily. I would like to log your request into the feature tracker, so if you can provide more details on the required report's content, this will be most appreciated. Thanks.

[dinger76]

Hi Gostev,

Let me see if I can put my requirement into a clearer light and hopefully answer the question on how this could be used for companies that backup more than once a day.

The way that I could see it working, would be that you select a period of time, a day, week or month (for example). Then maybe have tick boxes next to each of the jobs to be included in the report. You then generate the report and it will list the virtual machines down the first column and then have multiple additional columns for the dates/times of the backups jobs, with 'Success', 'Warning', 'Failed' and maybe 'N/A' next to each virtual machine in the list. Ideally, colour-coded Green for Success, Yellow for Warning and Red for Failed. You should probably fit maybe seven backup columns onto a page and then create additional pages depending on the number of backups columns required and the number of virtual machines backed up. It could look similar to something below:

Veeam Backup and Replication
Virtual Machine Backup Report
.
Virtual Machine Name........................24th June 2011.............25th June 2011..............26th June 2011
....................................................18:00:00....................18:00:00......................18:00:00
.
Virtual Machine 1................................ Success....................Success .......................Warning
Virtual Machine 2................................ Failed .....................Success ........................Failed
Virtual Machine 3................................ Warning................... Failed.........................Success
Virtual Machine 4................................ Failed......................Warning.......................Success

I hope that the table helps to clarify what we are looking for. I'm happy to provide a better design of the type of report that we would like to see and more information if it is required.

Thanks

[Gostev]

Thanks Chris!

[tigerplish]

This is something our company's very interested in as well. I'd love to see it implemented, and can help with testing such a solution, provided our workload permits it.

The auditors (sox and otherwise) insist in per-machine backup backup stats / proof.

[bracyskinner]

+1 for adding this functionality. It seems easy enough. It would be very valuable and something that SOX auditors would be happy with.

[davegold]

Hi,

We have customers requesting the same thing. Any update on whether this is in the product roadmap?

I've been looking at Powershell, and things as simple as "did this job succeed with a retry" don't appear to be possible via direct queries. I ended up looking at the database and correlated data from three different tables to figure out if a retry succeeded.

I would also aim for the ability to create a daily and weekly report with more detail that the SOX "good/bad" report above.

Thanks,

Dave

[Gostev]

Yes, it's in the roadmap.

[tsightler]

So, as an interim solution, you could setup your Veeam jobs to send their status emails to a public folder, a dedicated inbox, or an inbox with an Outlook rule that sends the message to a sub-folder, and then run a VBscript weekly to consolidate those emails into a digest email. An example of this technique is at http://gsexdev.blogspot.com/2006/01/cre ... x-sub.html but you'll probably need to modify it for this purpose. A kludge for sure, but far easier than manually compiling the information.

If you happen to have internal mailing list software, like Mailman or Majordomo, you could just create a lists and schedule weekly digests.

[dinger76]

Thanks for the information, unfortunately our company doesn't use Exchange and therefore the example listed wouldn't work well for us.

I understand that in v6 of the Veeam software, the PowerCli commands have been enhanced to allow us to perform tasks against individual vms and not just jobs and therefore if a suitable report isn't included in the new version, we'll be able to create something using those commands.

If I come up with anything, I'll post it on this forum.

Cheers