Veeam ONE vNEXT feedback/wishlist

[lando_uk]

Hi
Rather than just monitoring, why not move Veeam One also into the automation business? E.g. VM provisioning using pre-defined templates with customisations would be nice - make life simpler for us noobs who cant use PowerCLI !

If we had some automation features, Veeam could pretty much wipe out the competition - it would be the only suite of tools we'd need.

[Vitaliy S.]

Hi Mark,

Do you refer to all capabilities that can now be done via vSphere Client?

Thanks for the feedback!

[makovski]

We need to configure the plain text email format.

İn HTML format there is caption "Details:" at the begging of the alert detail in each alert mail, but in plain text format there is none. We need to add this in plain text emails.

[Vitaliy S.]

Let me talk to the devs and find out how easy it is to add details data to the alarm. Out of curiosity, what devices do you use to receive email notifications in plain text?

[jdgs]

Hi,

I raised a ticket with Veeam support, who directed me here.

What we would really benefit from with VeeamONE (currently trialing the product) is the ability to add conditions to rules, for alarms. We had this previously with a competing piece of software, and it was very valuable.

For example with Guest OS disk space alarm, we would like to set the rules as follows: Trigger alarm IF guest disk space is below 10% AND guest disk has less that 15GB free.

The problem we have is that some disks in our environment have unfortunately grown very large over time, so whilst 10% is a good rule in general, it means that for some disks, 10% could be 30 or 40GBs, so not really something we need to be alerted to.

Currently, if you add more than one rule to an alarm in VeeamONE, it will trigger the alarm if ANY of the conditions are met, rather than ALL of them.

Thanks

[Vitaliy S.]

Hi Jack,

That's a good feedback and I agree that this feature would be beneficial for everyone. In our upcoming version 9 there will an ability to create alarms with AND/OR triggers, so I believe it should address your use case.

Thanks!

[jdgs]

That sounds great. Is there yet a release date for v9?

[Vitaliy S.]

We are aiming to make it generally available in Q4 this year.

[jdgs]

That's great, thanks for the positive responses so far. Here is my next issue, or maybe there is a work around I am not using the software correctly (we are currently evaluating looking to switch from another provider of similar software).

With the other provider, you have the ability to build a custom dashboard with custom widgets reporting on key information. I created a custom dashboard for the guys on the helpdesk, so that they are able to quickly look up at it and see if anything is wrong and requiring immediate attention. This dashboard contains things like; current alarms, current guest cpu top-n, current guest network utilisation top-n, current cpu ready top-n etc. The problem I have is that with our current provider, it polls the vcenter for this information every 5-10mins, and the page refreshes every 5-10mins, meaning the team become aware of performance bottlenecks often before a user even calls. I built an equivalent dashboard in VeeamONE, but noticed that the data was stale, and did not update for over 2hrs. When I logged a support ticket, support informed me that this is by design, and only VeeamONE Monitor gives real time statistics, for the dashboards, it only updates when the collection task runs (lowest you can set this is 3hrs).

So I guess what we really need in order to make this a viable replacement for us, is the ability to have "real-time" or at least close to real time stats available on a custom dashboard.

Thanks

[Vitaliy S.]

Jack, yes, dashboards are not real-time. The main idea is not to replace real-time Monitor Client that should be used for troubleshooting, but rather provide data for trending and analytics. If you would like to use Veeam ONE dashboard in a NOC center, then we are planning to introduce a new feature in v9 that would rotate Veeam ONE Monitor Client tab based on the custom time schedule. This will allow you to be always informed about issues happening in the backup and virtual infrastructures.

[mattdwyerva]

Suggestion: Alarm suppression should include Veeam Restore Activity as well as Backup. NAS in particular suffer more in restore than in backup, at least for me. Or if you prefer, just "VBR activity" of any kind, meaning if VBR is active then suppress the alarm.

[Vitaliy S.]

Thanks, Matt! I will log this in our FR tracking system.

[AJ83]

I would love to see Veeam ONE monitor bring support for windows eventlog monitoring on Windows VM`s.

We now have to use another (way too expencive and feature rich) product for this. It could be done through WMI using admin credentials, no agent or anything needed, thats how the other product does it.

It would need the option of giving off alarms for different kind of eventlog entries, and the option of muting certain eventid`s for specific servers (sometimes an error in the eventlog is just not worth troubleshooting, but you don`t want email alarms on it).

Is this something Veeam has thought about implementing?

[Vitaliy S.]

That's already available, but only for Hyper-V hosts. Can you please give me a couple of examples of which event logs you're currently monitoring?

[AJ83]

We monitor System, and Application eventlogs of all our production windows VM`s. Some eventid`s are muted manually, but those are very specific to our situation.

[Vitaliy S.]

Ok, so either giving you a way to select events to monitor or pulling the entire event log for Application/System entry should be sufficient. Thanks for the feedback!

[AJ83]

Yes, we let it send notifications for every System/Application event that is on eventlevel Critical or Error. We usually don`t let it it alert on eventlevel warning.

[Vitaliy S.]

Do you need to store these events for historical data reporting or saving these events for a short-term retention policy would be fine?

[jveerd1]

Would be great if you could implement reporting on in-guest iSCSI connections. Really helpfull when migrating customers to Veeam.

[Vitaliy S.]

Hi Joeri, do you need to report that for VMs you're going to backup with VBR or for some other reason?

[jveerd1]

Correct, to identify possible issues with VBR backup of VMs.

[Vitaliy S.]

Yes, that's a good check to do indeed, however please keep in mind that it will require local admin credentials from all VMs you would like to make this verification for. We will discuss it internally .

[AJ83]

Do you need to store these events for historical data reporting or saving these events for a short-term retention policy would be fine?

Historical reporting on it would definitely add functionality, but alerting is our main purpose, so short-term would be good for us.

[Shestakov]

AJ,
Storing logs from huge number of VMs may be cumbersome for DBs, but should work fine for alarms.
Thanks for the feedback!

[coopsam]

Feature request:

When your are looking at a VM in the Veeam One client on the summary page the section where it says 'Last backup' and then gives days since backup, any chance these days could be a link to Veeam Enterprise manager for a report on that backup?

Thanks muchly!

[Vitaliy S.]

Hi Sam,

Not sure about linking it to Enterprise Manager, I would rather point it to Protected VMs report in Veeam ONE Reporter. Would that work for you?

Thanks!

[coopsam]

Hi

Yes that would work, better report might be the latest backup job status.

Going forward It would be nice to get individual reports from that link, so the latest backup report for that VM.

We are more and more using Veeam One as the portal for all our Veeam access so any integration with EM or B&R we welcome

Many thanks

Sam

[Vitaliy S.]

Got it, thanks! Veeam ONE is focusing on VBR monitoring and reporting, currently you can even right click on a particular object in the VI tree and run a backup report for this object.

[ajjacksonctct]

Is it possible to add a feature to allow you import fields like "notes" or "description" and then be able to use those fields in reporting?

[Shestakov]

Hello Antoine,
Try to use Custom Infrastructure report and choose Object type = Virtual Machine, Columns = VM notes, Name.
Thanks!