According to the results of our survey, Veeam ONE solution for monitoring and reporting the status of virtual infrastructures is becoming increasingly popular, and readers are interested in what's new in version 9.5 Update 4. Today we will look at the most significant new items, including:

• Smart diagnostics and troubleshooting
• Heatmaps
• Application monitoring
• New reporting and categorization options for working with Veeam Agents

For details, welcome under cat.

Smart diagnostics and automated troubleshooting

Built-in alerts about problems (alarms) in the properties now have a tab Knowledge Base with information from the manufacturer. It has the format of a Knowledge Base article about the issue that triggered this alert.

If there is a problem, for example, with the configuration, you will receive detailed information along with an alert about what could be the cause (Causes), and how to correct the situation (Resolution). And if, for example, there is already a hotfix for this problem, then you can simply contact the support service and request the appropriate files from them - such an example is just shown in the screenshot above.

Smart diagnostics Veeam Intelligent Diagnostics can not only give advice according to the built-in knowledge base. You can also customize the execution of remediation actions.

Important! For these automated repair actions (built-in or custom) to work on Veeam Backup & Replication servers, you need to install the Veeam ONE agent component. It has been written about in detail. here.

For example, consider the built-in notification that an unprotected virtual machine (or even several) has been detected. What can be done here?

1. To get started, open the alert settings (Alarm Settings) in the Veeam ONE Monitor console and go to the tab Actions:

   

2. Here on the list Action choose how to fix the situation with the VM without a backup, if one is found. A complete list of possible actions can be found here.
   We chose Add VM to backup job (add VM to backup task).

   Useful: For your own alerts, you can customize your own repair actions by specifying which script to run. To do this, in the notification settings on the tab Actions you have to press the button Add, then in the list Action select run script. Further into the field Path to script field enter the path to the desired script.

   Important! The script will be executed on Veeam ONE Server; you need to provide access to the script file for the Veeam ONE service account.

3. In the resolution type indicate whether you need to first obtain the approval of a person to perform the selected action:

   — automatically - no manual manipulations are required, after the notification is triggered, the program will automatically launch the specified action.
   — Manual (selected by default for built-in alerts) - after the alert is triggered, you will need to agree to perform the specified action. It is done like this:

   1. In the Veeam ONE Monitor console, select the desired view (Infrastructure View, Business View, vCloud Director View, Data Protection View) and the object of interest.
   2. In the panel on the right, go to the tab Alarms.
   3. Click on the icon Show remedial at the top to see which alerts need to be approved for appropriate actions.
   4. Then in the list of notifications, select the one you need, right-click and select the item Approve Action, or select it in the panel Actions on right.
   5. In dialogue Approve Remediation Actions if necessary, enter a comment (it will appear in the field How in the list of changes (history details), as well as in the email notification, if you have it configured.)
   6. Click here OK.

I note that you can select only one built-in action, and you can specify as many custom scripts as you need.

Veeam ONE will make 3 attempts to execute the built-in action or script. If everything goes well, the alert status will change to Acknowledged, and if not, the notification will remain active.

Heatmaps

Heatmaps (Heatmaps) appeared in Veeam solutions for a long time - the first to receive them was the Veeam Management Pack (about this was article on our blog, they are called "contextual dashboards"). Now they are implemented in Veeam ONE Reporter, where they also help you get an idea of ​​the state of your infrastructure and very quickly find where something went wrong. All this visualization is available by clicking on the widget Heat map tab Dashboards:

For example, here is a heat map of a healthy person of a backup infrastructure in which the load on Veeam backup proxies is reasonably balanced:

The widget on the left shows how much space is in the repository - we see that it is not so much. The widget in the center is pleasing to the eye in green - the load on the two proxy servers is distributed evenly.

Attention! If for some proxy the download is indicated in dark green, this means that the proxy is completely free, that is, it is idle, which is not good.

You can click on any of the proxy servers and see how big the load is during the day - here we see that the load falls on the backup window in the morning hours:

Let's now look at a less balanced infrastructure - the picture will be different there:

There are 3 proxy servers here, but one of them is obviously loaded more than the others (the one with the yellow-green indicator). If we consider it in detail, we will see that the main period of hard work falls on the night hours of work. Due to the underload of the remaining proxies, the backup window takes a rather long period of time, and it would be wiser to redistribute the load.

Click on the indicator for this proxy and then on the time span in the central widget to understand why the unfortunate proxy is overloaded - and here we will be shown detailed information, including the configuration of the proxy and the backup jobs that it processes:

The most common configuration errors include cases when the proxy settings are not suitable for performing a certain type of backup task - for example, if the settings specify to use the hot add, while the proxy itself is a physical server. Naturally, such a server will never be selected for the task, and the entire load will fall on the remaining proxies. As a result, the backup window will increase, which, of course, is undesirable.

In addition to proxies, you can also monitor the status of repositories on the heat map (including scalable Scale-Out Backup Repositories) - widget Repositories Usage displays how the repositories were busy processing backup tasks in parallel during the week.

Details on heatmaps in Veeam ONE Reporter can be found at documentation (in English).

Application monitoring

This new feature implemented in Veeam ONE Monitor allows us to closely monitor the operation of services and processes in a virtual machine:

Let's see how the SQL Server service works on the selected VM. Firstly, we can stop or resume this work - Veeam ONE Monitor can perform operations start, stop и restartby talking to the service control manager.

Secondly, you can set up an alert that will be triggered, for example, when the service state changes - to do this, right-click on our service and select Create Alarm>State:

You can set the alert settings, for example, so that it gives an error if the service has not been running for 5 minutes. In such a situation, most likely, you need to restart the service. The trigger rule for the alert will look like this:

With these settings, the alert will throw an error if the service state is different from Running for 5 minutes. Now let's go to the tab Action and indicate the repair action. In our example, this will automatically run a PowerShell script that will restart the service. We indicate the path to the script, we say that the type of our repair action is automatic (without our confirmation):

Useful: It would also be a good idea to set up sending notifications to users about the restart of the service.

Another useful example is setting alerts for service growth. Such a notification will be triggered, for example, if one or more new services have been installed on a critical machine. This may be the result of unauthorized software installation (or even malware).

You can set up alerts for processes, such as how they use resources and what their performance is. To do this, in the notification properties on the tab Rules select rule type Rule type: Process performance.

We then specify that we want to monitor CPU usage and generate an alert if it drops below a specified threshold. Thresholds can be set not only to generate an error (Error), but also for warning (Warning):

In this example, a 10% decrease in CPU usage will result in a warning, and a 25% decrease in CPU usage will result in an error.

New reports for Veeam Agents

Version 9.5 Update 4 has 3 new Veeam Agent Backup Jobs reports:

• Computer with no Archive Copy – with its help, you can quickly find out which machines are missing backups.
• Computer Backup Status - daily reports on the state of the backup for the physical machines on which the agents are running.
• Agent Backup Job and Policy History - Provides historical data on all Veeam Agent policies and jobs.

Well, if you don’t have enough out-of-the-box reports, then you can set up a summary custom report Backup Infrastructure Custom Data and include the necessary information about the operation of Veeam Agents.

Let's take a closer look at the last two reports. Let's take a look at the report first. Agent Backup Job and Policy History report:

1. Launch Veeam ONE Reporter, open the Workspace view.
2. We go to the folder with the built-in Veeam Backup Agent Reports reports.
3. We select the “Agent Backup Job and Policy History” report, select Scope for it and indicate the data for which period of time we want to include in it.

   Useful: Similarly, you can select a Veeam backup server or specify specific backup policy tasks.

4. Click here preview report and wait for the end of the report generation. Here's what it will look like:

   
   

You can click on the link on a specific date to see how the task worked on that day - what time it started, how long it lasted, what the size of the resulting backup was, whether it was a full or incremental backup.

Let's look at the report now. Backup infrastructure custom data. With it, you can get data that reports do not provide out of the box. To do this, you can use the report designer.

In Veeam ONE Reporter select Custom reports, find our report and specify for it:

• Scope: data from which Veeam Backup & Replication servers will be included in the report.
• object type: Types of objects you are interested in (Backup Server, Backup Job, Virtual Machine, Computer).
• Columns: Depending on the selected object type, here you can specify which of its properties we want to analyze using the report. They will be displayed in columns. For convenience, you can filter them (by clicking Filter). Remember that you can include no more than 50 properties in a report.
• Custom Filter: you can set your own filter for these columns.

You can read more about this report here. An example of what it might look like:

And with the help of Veeam ONE Business View, you can now assign the appropriate category to machines running Veeam Agents, which makes it easier for the administrator to monitor the infrastructure (Veeam backup servers that agents control should, of course, be monitored using Veeam ONE).

Details about the updated Business View can be found, for example, here (in English).

Both commercial and free versions of the solution are still available. A brief comparison table for them is given below:

Full table (in English) is available here.

What else to read and see

Download Veeam ONE:

• You can try the commercial version of Veeam ONE hence.
• free Community Edition hence.

• New Solution Features (in Russian)
• Video review of Veeam ONE (in Russian)
• Alerts User Guide (in English)
• Report User Guide (in English)

Source: habr.com