Plugin Backups Not In Veeam ONE - Success Rate Workaround

[Jay.N]

Hi all,

I wanted to post about something that I get asked occasionally, which is - 'Why can't I see Veeam plugin backups in Veeam ONE?'

When using the Veeam plugins to backup enterprise applications such as Oracle/SAP/SAP HANA etc. to a Veeam repository, these are classed as unmanaged backups. You can see these jobs/sessions in VBR, but they aren't managed by VBR and the backup processes are created by the application specific tools, such as RMAN for Oracle, SAP HANA Studio for SAP HANA etc. As such, Veeam ONE has no visibility of these backup sessions and this can be a problem if you want to see the overall success rate of the backups, as these workloads won't be included, and often these workloads are business critical.

In v12 there are new application backup policies which can backup these workloads, and then the information will be shown in Veeam ONE as the policies are managed by VBR. This option may not be desirable if database administrators manage the backups for these applications and if they want to continue using the application specific tools.

If you needed to show the success rate of plugin backups to management teams etc., you can export the information out of the Veeam configuration database, and I wanted to show you where to find this information. I'm using PostgreSQL on Windows in this example.

You can use pgAdmin to export the information as shown below

Once in pgAdmin and connected to the VeeamBackup database, if you open Schemas -> public -> Views then find the view wmiserver.jobsessionsview. Right click wmiserver.jobsessionsview and select Scripts then SELECT Script. You will see a default query in there and can change this. I suggest using
SELECT job_name, job_type, result, creation_time, end_time FROM public."wmiserver.jobsessionsview"

I found PGAdmin would lose connection to the database intermittently, especially when running large queries. If this happens to you, you can use the command line tool psql which got around the issue.

If PGAdmin does work ok, you'll see something similar to the below (I've crossed out job names as they contained production server names).



The list of job type and result values are shown below so you can identify, and easily sort, the plugin backup type and result.

Job_Type
OracleRMANBackup = 4030,
SapHanaBackintBackup = 4031,
OracleRMANRestore = 4032,
SapHanaBackintRestore = 4033,
OracleRMANBackupCopyWorker = 4035,
SapHanaBackintBackupCopyWorker = 4037,
PluginBackupCopyPolicy = 4038,
SapOracleBackintBackup = 4040,
SapOracleBackintRestore = 4041,
SapOracleBackintBackupCopyWorker = 4042,
MSSQLPluginBackup = 4043,
MSSQLPluginRestore = 4044,
MSSQLPluginBackupCopyWorker = 4045,
DB2PluginBackup = 4046,
DB2PluginRestore = 4047,
DB2PluginBackupCopyWorker = 4048,
DbPluginMetaUpgradeJob = 4100,

Result
None = -1
Success = 0
Warning = 1
Failed = 2

If you want to use psql for this you'll find it in the PostgreSQL install folder which in my case was C:\Program Files\PostgreSQL\15\bin.
Open an administrator command prompt and open psql from this location.
Connect to the Veeam database with

Code: Select all

psql -d VeeamBackup -U postgres

Output the information to a .txt file with

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\o jobsessions.txt

as an example. This will store the output file in the bin folder in the PostgreSQL install folder (in my case C:\Program Files\PostgreSQL\15\bin).
Run the query

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SELECT job_type, result, creation_time, end_time FROM public."wmiserver.jobsessionsview";

SELECT job_type, result, creation_time, end_time FROM public."wmiserver.jobsessionsview";
Quit psql with

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\q

If you open the output file you'll see the exported data (again I've blanked out the job names)



Once you have that information you can then use a tool of your choosing to visualise the success rate of the backups with graphs, charts etc. and it might be useful if management want to see something for these backups.

[PetrM]

Hi Jay,

I truly appreciate your efforts!! So close to saying that the code POC of showing unmanaged plug-ins in Veeam ONE is almost ready... (fyi: @RomanK )

Thanks!

[Jay.N]

Great news Petr! Thanks for the update.

[PetrM]

In fact, I meant that the research that you've done might be useful for our Devs as well but I have no idea about ETA.

Thanks!