Historical guest disk space report graph - Feature request

[ChrisGundry]

Hi,

We have a bit of software that we would like to replace as it only has one useful feature to us and I know that VeeamOne has the data to replace it.

Basically it gives us a graph of all of our physical (I know VeeamOne can't do this (whish it could) but we are going ot virtualise the remaining machines so this will go away) and virtual machines guest disk space over time on a per disk basis. So we can go on the graph and see what the C: drive disk space usage was on X day and then see how it changed over the following days/weeks. This is very useful because you can see if the low disk space condition just occured because 50GB of data was added or if it has been sat at 10.1% usage for weeks and a small addition of say 150mb has pushed it into a low condition. Without a historical usage graph its difficult to know this.

Now I know VeeamOne has this guest disk space usage data because it shows it in the monitor GUI when you click on the VM. I also know it stores it rather than just displaying it (See below).

I have also found the following report: VMware overview> Guest disk free space> Gives you a list of all the VMs and their disk usage. The problems with this report for us are:
1. It can't be filtered per VM, see 2 & 3
2. It takes a while to generate because it does all VMs, see 1
3. If we want to look at growth over a long period like the last 2 years, then this takes a VERY long time and makes the report window hang a fair bit
4. Once you do get this report it still doesn't help because it is just numbers, no useful graph for us.

However, if you click the VM name on the last screen of the report then you get almost exactly what we want in terms of a graph, it shows the disk usage of each disk, over time.

Request:
So my request is:
- A dedicated report so we can skip straight to a report we need
- Ability to specify VM name/s and a date range to report on
- Ideally we could also specify a guest disk letter to report on as well
- Lastly, if possible we would like to have an additional counter. At the moment we have used space and free space. We would also like to see overall capacity, ie the allocated C: drive size. This would be handy to see because if there is a big jump in free space, it could be because lots of files were deleted or it could be that someone just expanded the disk by x amount.

Thanks!

[Vitaliy S.]

Hi Chris,

Thanks for the detailed post! I see your point, but selecting 2 years as a period you want analyze data for can indeed take some time and it is absolutely expected due to the amount of data that has to be queried. Filtering VMs might be possible to do with Business View groups, so this might also help in your case. Finally, did you have a chance to review "VMware Raw Performance Data" report and select VM guest disks as a counter (monitored sub-system) to build the report against? This might be exactly what you're looking for based on what I've understood so far.

Thanks!

[ChrisGundry]

Hi Vitaliy,

I understand why it takes a long time at the moment, but I am asking to reduce that time by selecting only the machine I am interested in. You can't do that at the moment. If you allowed the 'Virtual infrastructure' to drill down from DC>Cluster/Host>Resources (VMs/datastores) like you can in the VeeamOne GUI then this would be exactly what we want.

On some reports you can specify an include/exclude list but on others you cannot, which is annoying.

Business view - This isn't really practical as this is an ad-hoc request. We can't setup a business view/group each time we want to look at a particular VMs historical disk space.

Raw performance data - I have looked at this view and it is the closest to what we want for sure. But it doesn't show the overall space, only used and free space At the moment we will be using this view/report.

I guess it would be nice to be able to bypass reports completely actually. The other views in the VeeamOne client like CPU/memory/datastore usage all allow you to view historical data, right in the GUI. Why not guest disk space? If that could be added to the client that would be amazing for us!

Thanks

[Vitaliy S.]

Ok, good that we have found a temp solution for your know. We will discuss internally if guest disks info can be added to the Monitor Client in our future releases. Thanks for the feedback, Chris!

[ChrisGundry]

Thanks!

[ChrisGundry]

Hi Vitaliy,

Did anything come of looking into this request? This feature would be really helpful to us and much better than having to run a report each time.

Thanks

[Shestakov]

Hi Chris, as far as I'm concerned, the feature request was noted and added to the roadmap, but was not included into v9.5 update 4 release.
I'll double-check in my lab on Monday.
Thanks!

[Shestakov]

As I said, there is no historical guest disk space graph in Veeam ONE Monitor.
However, you can get the data in Guest Disk Free Space report.
Thanks!

[ChrisGundry]

Nikita: I didn't get a notification of your reply for some reason.

That report does not show what we wanted. We want a graph which shows the growth over x period, per disk. We want to be able to click on a VM in VeeamONE and see disk space usage per disk, like you can memory or CPU etc. We know VeeamONE has this data so it should be really easy for Veeam to add this function to the GUI and would be really helpful to us.

[Shestakov]

Hi Chris,
have you checked the drill-down of the report? It shows each disk's data growth history:

[ChrisGundry]

Yes I did, whilst this is a big improvement over what it showed in the previous version it still doesn't show what we would like and doesn't work for us. It doesn't show per disk at a time, it shows all disks on the server at the same time. We have disks that are 20GB or 100GB and disks that are 4TB on the same server. So it means we can't see a graph for the 20GB disk or even 100GB disks because the 4TB disks throw off the scale.

This report is also only available in an infrastructure or business view. So we can't click on 'file server 1' and only report on that, we would have to create a business view for it, then report on that. Or load a report for a whole business view or infrastructure view, which takes a long time because there are a a lot of servers and we want to report on say the last 6 months of growth, then select 'file server 1'.

It is just really frustrating because we know Veeam has the data and we know that Veeam has the fundamental structure in place because they can do these reports and also the graphs within VeeamONE monitor GUI. We just would like to be able to do the same thing you can do for CPU but for individual guest disks.

[Shestakov]

It doesn't show per disk at a time, it shows all disks on the server at the same time. We have disks that are 20GB or 100GB and disks that are 4TB on the same server. So it means we can't see a graph for the 20GB disk or even 100GB disks because the 4TB disks throw off the scale.

Good point. We can offer 2 variations of drill-down reports in future: all VM disks and particular disk in next product versions.

This report is also only available in an infrastructure or business view. So we can't click on 'file server 1' and only report on that, we would have to create a business view for it, then report on that. Or load a report for a whole business view or infrastructure view, which takes a long time because there are a a lot of servers and we want to report on say the last 6 months of growth, then select 'file server 1'.

Could you clarify it? How would you like to see the scope of the report?

It is just really frustrating because we know Veeam has the data and we know that Veeam has the fundamental structure in place because they can do these reports and also the graphs within VeeamONE monitor GUI. We just would like to be able to do the same thing you can do for CPU but for individual guest disks.

Agree here. We will consider adding the info to Monitor. Thanks for the request!

[ChrisGundry]

Thank you.

We mean that we normally want to see this on a per server and per disk basis. So we want to be able to specify a single server. I can see why this doesn't fit in with what you have setup in reports where its virtual infrastructure or business view.

This is why we wanted it in the monitor application, where we can select a single server at a time.

Hopefully that makes sense.

[Shestakov]

Thanks for the explanation.
Your requests make sense, I have added them to our roadmap.

[ChrisGundry]

Thank you, hopefully they will be added sometime soon!

[Shestakov]

Not sure if we can add it to the upcoming release, but will try to implement your ideas in the next ones.
Thanks again