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Veeam ONE Getting the Best Experience

Paul SzelesiEMEA Solution Architect Manager


Veeam ONE — Getting the Best Experience

Contacting Veeam SoftwareAt Veeam® Software we value feedback from our customers. It is important not only to help you quickly with your technical issues, but it is our mission to listen to your input and build products that incorporate your suggestions.

Customer support

Should you have a technical concern, suggestion or question, please visit our Customer Center Portal at www.veeam.com/support.html to open a case, search our knowledge base, reference documentation, manage your license or obtain the latest product release.

Company contacts

For the most up to date information about company contacts and office locations, please visit www.veeam.com/contacts.html

Online support

If you have any questions about Veeam ONE™, you can use the following resources: Full documentation set: www.veeam.com/documentation-guides-datasheets.html. Community forum at forums.veeam.com

http://www.veeam.com/support.html

http://www.veeam.com/contacts.html

http://www.veeam.com/documentation-guides-datasheets.html

http://www.veeam.com/documentation-guides-datasheets.html

https://forums.veeam.com/



About this documentThis guide describes deployment scenarios, provides information about the product design and structure, and offers step-by-step instructions for successful post-installation configuration and reporting.

This guide is intended to help extend the knowledge of current and new users of Veeam ONE in understanding the powerful tools that are at the disposal of the user within the suite.

Intended audience

The guide is intended for anyone who is using the Veeam ONE solution version 9.5 or below. It is primarily aimed at administrators managing Veeam Availability Suite™, Veeam Backup & Replication™, VMware vSphere, vCloud Director or Microsoft Hyper-V environments, but can also be helpful for other current and prospective Veeam ONE users.

Document Revision History

Revision # Date Change Summary

Revision 15/12/2016 Initial version of the document for Veeam ONE 9.5



ContentsIntroduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

About Veeam ONE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

Veeam ONE architecture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

Licensing Veeam ONE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

Types of licenses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

Deployment checks and configurations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

Configuring Veeam ONE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

Configure your notification methods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

Connect the servers you wish to monitor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .11

Disable all the alarms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .11

Choose objects to monitor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

Add users to the relevant groups . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17

Veeam monitor summary. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18

Veeam ONE & alarms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18

Editing an alarm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20

Choosing your alarms to enable . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23

Veeam business view (inside Veeam ONE monitor) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27

Data protection view . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28

Reporting from inside Veeam ONE monitor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32

Performance cache . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35

Data collection schedule . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .36

Data collection mode . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .36

How to get the best from business view . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38



Veeam ONE business reporter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44

The dashboards . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44

Dashboard scheduling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .49

Workspace and reports . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .54

All deployments projects folder . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .56

My reports folder . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61

Veeam ONE suite summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66

About the Author . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67

About Veeam Software . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67



IntroductionThis document is not an installation document or a document on setup of a Veeam ONE environment, there are many documents that will show you how to install, configure and start monitoring with Veeam ONE. This document is based around common questions and installations customers already have and use every day. The issues they came across were digested leading to this document to help gain an understating of the basics of Veeam ONE, helping you get the most out of your investment.

Veeam ONE is a large program offering many facets to business alarms, monitoring and reporting. Many features sit deep and are not seen from the basics install or setup documents. These documents are designed to get you up and running quickly, efficiently and usually without much fuss. This document is aimed at showing the finer features of Veeam ONE.

What will be covered is the following:

Configuration of service components including:

• Veeam ONE Server

• Veeam ONE Web UI

• Veeam ONE Monitor Client

Detailed descriptions and use for the following:

• Capacity planning for VMware

• Capacity planning for Hyper-V

• Monitoring

• Reporting

• Change tracking

• Auditing

• Business and technical views of your infrastructure

• Raw data analysis and advanced report customization

What will not be covered:

• VMware Cloud Director (this is a wider subject than the intention of this document)



About Veeam ONE Veeam ONE is a comprehensive solution developed by Veeam Software for managing virtual and data protection environments. Veeam ONE enables real-time monitoring, business documentation and management reporting for Veeam Backup & Replication, VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V. Veeam ONE is designed to give IT administrators peace-of-mind to manage every aspect of the modern virtual environment. Every Veeam ONE capability meets a specific business challenge — from monitoring the state of VMs and their performance, generating reports for capacity planning and upgrade purposes, to providing management with transparent and granular views of the virtual infrastructure from a business-oriented perspective.

Veeam ONE incorporates three software components:

• Veeam ONE Monitor is the primary tool used for monitoring the virtual environment and Veeam Backup & Replication infrastructure. In the Veeam ONE Monitor console, you can manage, view and interact with alarms and monitoring data, analyze performance of virtual and backup infrastructure components, track the efficiency of data protection operations, troubleshoot issues, generate reports and administer monitoring settings.

• Veeam ONE Reporter provides a set of dashboards and reports that allow you to verify configuration issues, optimize resource allocation and utilization, track implemented changes, plan capacity growth and track whether mission-critical VMs are properly protected in the virtualized data center.

• Veeam ONE Business View allows you to group your virtual infrastructure objects into such categories as SLA, business unit, purpose, configuration entity, or any other. The categorization model you create in Business View is applied to the monitoring and reporting functionality to simplify management and ensure transparency of operations for your business across large virtual environments. Veeam ONE Monitor, Veeam ONE Reporter and Veeam ONE Business View are installed with one setup and provide a single cohesive solution.

Veeam ONE architecture Veeam ONE relies on client-server architecture to work effectively in environments of any size and complexity.

Veeam ONE architecture includes the following structural components:

• Veeam ONE Server Veeam ONE Server is responsible for collecting data from virtual servers, vCloud Director servers and Veeam Backup & Replication servers and storing this data into the database. As part of Veeam ONE Server, the following components are installed: Veeam ONE Monitoring Server and Veeam ONE Reporting Server.

• Veeam ONE Web UI Veeam ONE Web UI is a client part for Veeam ONE Reporter and Business View. Veeam ONE Web UI communicates with the database, processes and displays data in a web-based interface. As part of Veeam ONE Web UI, the following components are installed: Veeam ONE Reporting Client and Veeam ONE Business View Client.

• Veeam ONE Monitor Client Veeam ONE Monitor Client is a client part for Veeam ONE Monitoring Server. Veeam ONE Monitor Client communicates with the Veeam ONE Monitoring Server installed locally or remotely. Veeam ONE Database stores data used by product components. The database is hosted on a Microsoft SQL Server that can run remotely, or can be co-installed with other Veeam ONE components. Veeam ONE architectural components can be installed on a single machine, or run on dedicated machines. For details, see Deployment scenarios.



Licensing Veeam ONE Veeam ONE can be licensed in two ways:

• Per-socket Veeam ONE can be licensed by the number of CPU sockets on managed VMware vSphere or Microsoft Hyper-V hosts. A license is required for every occupied motherboard socket as reported by the hypervisor API. A managed host is a host that is included in the monitoring and reporting scope with Veeam ONE inclusion rules. For details, see Choosing VMs to monitor and report on.

• Per-VM Veeam ONE can be licensed by the number of managed VMs. A managed VM is a VM that is included in the monitoring and reporting scope with Veeam ONE inclusion rules. For details, see Choosing VMs to monitor and report on.

Note: 1. Per-VM licenses are provided to Veeam Cloud & Service Provides (VCSPs) only. For end-users, Veeam offers per-socket licenses.

Note: 2. Veeam ONE license does not put any restrictions on the number of managed vCloud Director servers and Veeam Backup & Replication servers.

Types of licenses

Veeam Software offers paid and free licenses for Veeam ONE. Veeam Software offers the following types of paid licenses for Veeam ONE:

• Perpetual license is a permanent full license.

• The perpetual license term is normally 10 years from the license issue date.

• The support and maintenance period included with the license is specified in months or years.

• Typically, the perpetual license includes one year of standard support and maintenance. With the perpetual license, Veeam ONE can be licensed per-socket or per-VM.

• Subscription license is a full license that expires at the end of the subscription term.

• The subscription license term is normally one to three years from the license issue date.

• Subscription license using Veeam ONE can be licensed per-socket only.

• Rental license is a full license with the license expiration date set according to the chosen rental program (normally one to 12 months from the license issue date).

• The rental license can be automatically updated upon expiration.

• With the rental license, Veeam ONE can be licensed per-VM only.

• Free license is a limited subset of the main program features, monitoring, reporting and optimization are all functional however not all reports or optimizations are available.

• Support is also limited.

The following terms apply to Veeam ONE paid licenses:

License type Licensing Licensing period

Perpetual license Per socket/Per VM 10 years

Subscription license Per socket One to three years

Rental license Per VM One to 12 months



Deployment checks and configurationsWe will look at the common configurations of which there are really only two, to understand what is a suitable configuration and why to deploy it in this manner.

Veeam ONE supports two deployment scenarios:

• Typical deployment The typical deployment scenario is ideal if you want to consolidate the entire product functionality in one place by installing all product architectural components on a single machine. This scenario is preferable for small- to medium-scale deployments.

• Advanced deployment The advanced deployment is more suitable if you want to separate client/server roles and install product architectural components on different machines.

The rest of this document does not differ from one deployment to the other as all information is relevant to both types.

What is important however are the following facts on each type:

• For large-scale deployments (1000+ VMs), it is recommended to use a remote Microsoft SQL Server installation as a backend. It is also recommended to run Veeam ONE services on a dedicated server. Such distributed installation will improve performance of Veeam ONE services.

• To enable multi-user access to real-time performance statistics and configurable alarms, you can additionally install several instances of Veeam ONE Monitor Client on separate machines. You will be able to access Veeam ONE functionality either from a local machine or from remote computers.

The advanced installation utilizes a client-server model for data collection and communication.

• Server component collects data from virtual infrastructure servers, vCloud Director servers and Veeam Backup & Replication servers and stores this data in the database.

• Web UI components (Veeam ONE Reporting and Business View components) communicate with the database allowing users to access collected data for generating reports and managing business categorization.

• Monitor Client communicates with Veeam ONE Server directly to obtain real-time virtual infrastructure performance data and data protection statistics.

For a successful Veeam ONE deployment, it is essential that the client components are aware of the Veeam ONE Server and the database location and can connect to them to process and manipulate data.



Configuring Veeam ONEThere are four main steps to start working with Veeam ONE:

1. Configure your notification methods

2. Connect the servers you plan to monitor

3. Choose objects to monitor

4. Add users to the relevant groups

Each of these steps are required to ensure good operation of your deployment, the basic wizard will take you through these steps to get you up and running however manipulation and customization will ensure the correct servers, hosts, objects and people responsible are being monitored and notified.

Configure your notification methods

The notification methods are one of the most important methods Veeam ONE uses to ensure you are contacted for any of the criteria you request this form of communications from. They must be configured and tested correctly to operate. If you need to amend or have not set these details you can open Veeam Monitor and along the top you will see link buttons, one of which is Notifications, or you can select the Options button and Server Options. The first tab you will see is the SMTP tab followed by notification groups and SNMP. Double check to make sure all your settings are correct and send a test email.



Connect the servers you wish to monitor

Veeam ONE uses four categories to monitor and report on your infrastructure, these are located in the bottom left hand corner of the software view:

• Infrastructure View

• Business View

• Data Protection View

• Alarms View

Each of the first three views correspond to a level of monitoring or reporting with the last covering all the alarms and settings for the alarms that you may require. To enable Veeam ONE to fully function we must add the servers we want to monitor and exclude any systems we do not want reports or alarms on from within the Infrastructure View.

If the default settings are still in place with all the default alarms, (already deployed? you may find your mailbox was becoming full and switched off email notifications) you will be inundated with emails and false alarms for metrics we did not know we were looking at. This is what happens in most deployments especially when a next, next, next or unplanned deployment takes place.

Disable all the alarms

So how do we ensure this does not happen? Firstly, straight after deployment go to the alarms view section by selecting Alarms View link in the bottom left section. If already deployed, please treat this the same way.

Make sure you select the top-level alarm icon which will show all the alarms available to Veeam ONE.



In the center where all the alarms are now listed, select every alarm in the list and on the right side you will see a list of options. ONE of the options is to disable the alarms, at this point we want to disable all the alarms and control what and how we enable the alarms (this will save a deluge of emails as we add servers which set off alarms).

We will revisit here later to choose the correct alarms to action and which to leave disabled. It is easier to control if we start from all disabled rather than all enabled.

Add servers

At this point we will look at adding servers to be monitored, select the link for the Infrastructure View in the bottom left corner which will change the main page to either a listing of your exiting servers or an empty left hand panel of a new deployment. In an existing deployment or new deployment with the default settings applied we will see all the infrastructure our virtual environment can see including clusters, hosts, VMs and datastores from either Hypervisor type (vSphere or Hyper-V).

Veeam ONE 9.5 introduced the ability to have exclusion and inclusion policies for infrastructure objects, we can be as broad as a full cluster or as narrow as a single alarm type. Planning on what is needed to be monitored is essential, even if it is the full infrastructure there are alarms that can be applied to policies rather than a blanket catchall where Hyper-V alarms are placed against vSphere objects and vice versa or a read only datastore is being monitored for writes. The better we control the monitoring the less resources are consumed and the more responsive our system can be.

By default, the system creates a policy to include everything, this is a blanked policy and if left in place will catch all. When we start to use custom policies, it should be deleted or it will still function. Policies are not restrictive but additive, the real power of these policies is seen in the reporting as we move on.

Exclusions work in two ways, we can choose to explicitly include objects in our policy or we can choose to explicitly exclude an object. The most restrictive setting will always override any other setting if by any error it appears in both types of policy. When an object is not included in any policy including the default policy it will effectively be unmonitored. Thus the object becomes italicized and options become unusable on the object, the object will have excluded in brackets at the end of the name. We do not want the object to disappear as it is part of the infrastructure but it is excluded from actions within Veeam ONE Infrastructure View. As we use Business View we find those excluded items do not appear as options to use in any reports.

To create a policy, we must have something to monitor. In a deployed scenario, servers will already be available. However, in this I mentioned to skip adding virtual infrastructure at the beginning so we will need to add something.



We have four options when adding a server, when you wish to add a server check across the top and you will see the “Add Server” button, this will bring up the box below for you to choose what you want to add.

One note to add here is around the Hyper-V server options and SCVMM, if you wish to use this option and use the SCVMM server itself you must have the SCVMM console installed on the Veeam ONE server or it will not allow you to add the server. So, if required install this prior to adding your SCVMM server. (it is available from the SCVMM installation media)

We will use a vSphere server as an example, following the wizard we will give you a request for an FQDN or IP address, preference is FQDN as this assures you that your DNS is working. We use DNS for resolution so it stands to reason this should be in place. The request is for a username and password for the server, although the wizard asks for Domain\username. If you use SSO then the same credentials are required that you use to login to the VCenter server and not Domain\username.



Following this, the wizard will attempt to login and then show the summary once successful. We will be taken back to the main page and the screen below will reflect all that is available to use on this added server. Note everything is green as we have disabled all alarms. Continue to add servers until you have all your servers listed in the left column.

Choose objects to monitor

Now we can create the policies that we want to apply to each group as we define categories or groups of infrastructure we are interested in. On the top row, go to the options button and select “Server Settings.” When the window opens navigate along the tabs to “Monitored VMs.” We can see the default rule applied here, select and delete this rule using the buttons on the right.



Now we want to create our own policies that only include our wanted VM’s or hosts. Select “Create new” and name the Policy, choose next and click the add button, choose the “Infrastructure Tree” button. Navigate down and (in our case) find the vSphere cluster expanding the top cluster to reveal the child objects below. Check the box for your cluster and leave the datastores unchecked. You will notice I have a Hyper-V host left alone, I will apply a separate policy for this host later.

Select OK and you are taken to the VM selection screen. This screen has two options, select by Object name or by Infrastructure Location. Object name will open another step up in the wizard prompting for the condition or name that you wish to look for such as all VM’s that start or end “_srv” for example and those Vm’s will be part of the policy but only those VM’s. Selecting by Location will take any child objects including the checked box you selected in the Apply Rule section, this is a catch all.

We now need to do the same to the datastores we wish to include in our policy, navigate left to the Monitored Datastore tab and select the datastores you wish to monitor. I have deselected the local and read only datastores as I have no need to monitor those.



As I have not included the Hyper-V host in the policy, you can see it is excluded from all monitoring. I do wish to monitor this later so I will create a policy just for the Hyper-V server.

And after adding a policy

We have now got some form of control of our infrastructure objects for monitoring purposes, this will become more apparent when we look at reporting.



Add users to the relevant groups

ONE thing that must be done correctly is to add the relevant users to the right Veeam ONE security groups. Within the software there are options that can be pre-configured such as running scripts or session connections to remotely monitored infrastructure. The last thing you need is to have a tightly-controlled infrastructure with full security lockdown and to leave this software open to abuse.

There are three groups created on the Veeam ONE hosts:

• Veeam ONE Administrators

• Veeam ONE Read-Only Viewers

• Veeam ONE Dashboard Viewers

Veeam ONE Administrators

Members of this group can access monitoring data, generate reports and modify all Veeam ONE service accounts. (This group must include the Veeam ONE service account)

Veeam ONE Read-Only Users

Members of this group can generate reports and access monitoring data in read only mode but cannot modify Veeam ONE configuration settings.

Veeam ONE Dashboard Viewers

Built-in system group used by Internet Information Services (IIS) to allow access to Veeam ONE dashboards.

The groups are available for management in the local machine “Local Users and Groups” within computer management.

By default, the administrative account used to log onto Veeam ONE is added to Veeam ONE Read-Only Users and Veeam ONE Administrators. For Veeam ONE Dashboard Viewers only the authenticated user group is added. Adding restrictive group only takes a minute but will protect you always going forward. Ensure you set the right groups only.



Veeam monitor summary

Veeam ONE Monitor is a powerful tool which can take all your virtual infrastructure and monitor for reporting, alarming and backup protection. It can send emails, SNMP traps or run scripts based off fully customizable alarms and schedules.

Out of the base install is the capability to report and register alarms based off Veeam’s default settings, these settings are a great starting point but to get the best you should customize the installation settings to meet the business needs of your unique organization.

With these customizations comes the ability to selectively monitor specific objects such as hosts, datastores, virtual machines, backup and replication.

Always create a VM group with your own requirements included, Veeam by default includes everything. While at first it may be ok to allocate resources on objects that are not relevant, it is a waste and as you scale it becomes more important in the overall structure of monitoring and reporting alarm triggers.

Storage is another object that requires reconfiguration. You may have local disks that are never utilized or of no consequence, take them out of the equation and concentrate on what your business needs to monitor.

Remember Veeam ONE monitor also has the ability to exclude items as well as include them, this gives granular levels of control around monitoring and reporting.

Configure access right to the security groups that need rights, all users need to be in a group that is included in Veeam ONE group on the local Veeam ONE server.

Veeam ONE & alarmsEarlier we disabled all our alarms, this was to stop a tirade of emails being sent to your email recipient with a lot of alarms, errors and alerts. We now need to look at how we can control the alarms and stop them being meaningless. There is the story of the boy who cried wolf and we want to make sure all our alarms are real wolves.

Alarm Management is found in the bottom left hand corner of Veeam ONE Monitor. Once selected, we will be met with a hierarchical view of the monitored objects. What we see by default is the following list of objects that will expand to show child objects related to the parent:

• VMware

• Hyper-V

• Backup & Replication

• Internal

Firstly, the internal alarms are for the Veeam ONE Server itself and we do want to enable the alarms for this device for the basic reason we must be sure our monitoring is up. If you look you will see it makes sense to make sure those alarms ARE enabled. You need to be sure your monitoring is monitored as well as your infrastructure.

As we expand the other, we start to see the child objects for each parent.



As we select each child we can start to see the relevant alarms for each one and they should show as greyed out and disabled at this point. The right side shows actions we can take on each monitor. We can also see on the right side of the main page under Resolve Actions what is the action required of each alarm once triggered.

This alarm will wait for manual resolution if the alarm is triggered. This is the bad username and password alarm on VCenter so you would not want it to automatically disappear.



Editing an alarm

We can now look at editing the alarm to meet our need and not just the basic alarm actions. On the right side choose edit. This will open the configuration settings for the alarm.

From here we can change all aspects of the alarm and what it monitors or what actions it will take.

Rules

Let’s take a look at the rule applied on this alarm.

Currently we have an event as the rule type and it is enabled, with BadUsernameSessionEvent being the monitored event in the VCenter log. Part of the power of Veeam ONE is the ability to add more rules to a single alarm. We can have multiple triggers for an alarm. Our example is for a single rule of bad username or login so only one is realistic here.



This rule is applied at the level in the assignment section, currently this is set to all Virtual Infrastructure. As you look at more alarms you may see an alarm that is only focused on a particular parent set such as Hyper-V or VMware-only specific alarms or even multiple locations for the alarm to be monitoring.

Actions

As we move along the tabs on the top to actions, we see the outcome of the event once it is triggered and can have multiple actions by using the add button on the right. The below picture shows the three options for an action:

• Send an Email to a recipient

• Sent an SNMP trap

• Run a script

Of the three, the one most missed out is the ability to run your own scripts against an alarm. This can be any script that delivers a required action against the alarm triggered. Most commonly used is the email notification.



Suppress

As we move onto the next tab which is suppress we find a powerful anti-false-positive option. It is the ability to do something with your knowledge that affects alarms notifications and attention to alarms raised.

There are many circumstances where an alarm will cause an email event to be triggered and the recipient will ignore it saying it is only “X” or “Y” process and they are aware of it each day so they ignore the alarm.

There will be one day however when the alarm should not be ignored, the trick is to know which it is. Suppress gives the option to choose a time or event to not cause an alarm to be triggered, for example when disk latency gets high during a backup job run or a specific time of day when the CRM churns its data. These are the high-risk moments.

With Suppress you can choose when to not trigger an alarm based off normal conditions. We also want to make sure we still monitor these objects but at a higher level of measurement. We can have an alarm that is triggered off a much higher metric that only runs when the backup is running or the CRM churn is executing allowing for a more lenient alarm in a much more controlled fashion. Now every alarm will be investigated and nothing should be allowed to be ignored.

Knowledge base

The last tab is also a powerful tab, this is the Knowledge Base tab. Veeam ONE includes a rich and extensive knowledge base for alarms that are triggered. In the main page once an alarm is triggered the Knowledge Base will explain what the alarm is and how it could have been triggered. It will also point to a relevant article on how to avoid this going forward or maybe how to remediate the issue at hand.



As shown in the main monitored window when the alarm is triggered

Choosing your alarms to enable

Now that we know how to build an alarm and edit the settings it is useful to know what to use for monitoring. Alarms are always on so it pays to have the right alarms enabled for your system. As an example, if you do not have Hyper-V or VMware then why have the alarms enabled; they will still listen even though you don’t have them to trigger anything.

Configure your alarms to only monitor what you have. At the start we disabled the alarms while we added our monitored infrastructure to reduce the number of false positives we received, now we need to enable just the right ones we are interested in.

Is there a list to this? The answer sadly is no, everyone has a base set of monitors they wish to have active for alarm triggers and these are much the same. CPU, Memory, Network, Storage, Backups, speed –– the list can go on but the metrics are what is important.

When we open the alarms link from the bottom left we see over 200 alarms. This may seem daunting at first, however we can expand the sections and break them down into the smaller, easier to manage alarms sections with less alarms at a time to deal with.



Selecting an item in the tree such as VMware; Any Object will reduce the amount of alarms and direct you to specific alarms related to only those branches of the tree.



Here we can only see 16 alarms that only relate to the “Any Object” section.

So, let’s leave the Hyper-V alarms set to disabled as we are not monitoring Hyper-V at present and then section by section check each alarm you are interested in for all the sections left in VMware.

One point to stress here is Veeam has set the metrics to a default industry standard setting to trigger alarms. These may not be relevant to your particular business or environment so as you go through the alarms make sure you edit them to get the right counters measuring the right numbers.

To help you with this, Veeam has included a modelling feature to help you understand what is high, low or not significant. To use this, choose an alarm and right click for a drop-down menu, select Modelling.

What we will see is the below box for selection of alarms to be modelled. It is a simple process in that we choose a timespan to measure from and then select the alarm you wish to measure, based off the settings you have in place it will show information, warnings and errors triggered. If this result fits in with your environment all could be good. If you see too many alarms trigger where you saw no detrimental effect, think about changing that alarm to a higher measure or metric that fits. By doing this over a period of time you can quickly work out what you need for each alarm and what measure is current for your business.



Select an alarm and choose time period, then use the “Start Modelling” button.

As you can see, the outcome shows how many triggers and what type over that time span. Use this as a way to see if your chosen measures reflect your infrastructure.

Alarms summary

Disabling all your alarms on installation is not a bad thing, Veeam enables alarms by default and some counters not relative to you may trigger sending a flurry of emails to your group inbox. By disabling alarms at first you can control the enablement of the alarms and notifications. Set your measurements based off your business need and not just what Veeam has set as default. Many are industry standard but not unique to your business.

So, now you can work your way down through the alarms and enable the ones that suit your needs as an organization and leave disabled the ones you have no need for.

• Going through each section one at a time will allow you to focus on what you want from a section in a controlled manner rather than looking at every alarm in a long list of little relevance.

• Do not enable alarms if you do not have the resources in your infrastructure for it, such as VMware when you are only using Hyper-V or vice-versa. It will make your sensors more sensitive with resources being allocated to things that matter.

• You can define your own rules and actions from those rules, many people choose email or SNMP traps. However, don’t rule out that you can have multiple actions including running scripts on the affected object.

• Resources have periods of high usage and low usage. If these are time conscious or when the backups are running, edit the alarm and set the times to ignore the triggers or the backup schedule resource high.

• You can create an alarm with a high threshold at specific resource usage times and another alarm with a lower threshold for other times to be flexible without ignorance of your workload. No more ignoring alarm emails as you know it will alarm; due to the process on the server at that particular time of day, it could be a different reason than you think.

Alarms are always on where data collection is every morning at 3 a.m. by default.



One last point on Maintenance Mode

Maintenance mode is used to suppress alarms for specific infrastructure objects during planned maintenance operations. When you place an infrastructure object on maintenance mode, Veeam ONE will suppress all alarms on this object.

You can enable the maintenance mode for single infrastructure objects or containers. When you enable the maintenance mode for a container, you can choose to suppress alarms on its child objects as well. For example, if you want to perform maintenance on a host, you can enable the maintenance mode for the host itself and for all VMs on this host.

You can enable the maintenance mode manually or set a maintenance schedule.

You can see the switch for Maintenance Mode on the right actions pane or by right clicking on an object.

Veeam business view (inside Veeam ONE monitor)Veeam ONE Monitor can present the virtual infrastructure from the technical perspective (in terms of VMware vSphere or Microsoft Hyper-V inventory) and from the business perspective (based on your company’s needs and priorities). Presentation of virtual infrastructure objects from the business perspective is enabled due to categorization capabilities provided by Veeam ONE Business View.

Veeam ONE Business View allows you categorize virtual infrastructure objects — VMs, hosts, clusters and datastores/storages — according to constructs of your business. You can group the virtual infrastructure objects by such criteria as business unit, department, purpose, SLA and others. Veeam ONE feeds this business categorization data into Veeam ONE Monitor and enables you to monitor, troubleshoot, resolve issues and report on business groups of virtual infrastructure objects. Learn how to create custom categories and groups for the virtual infrastructure.

To work with the business view of your virtual infrastructure in Veeam ONE Monitor, click Business View at the bottom left of the page. In this view, you can use monitoring capabilities for business groups created for your virtual environment.

Once Veeam ONE Business View has been configured (see later in the document) the link within Veeam ONE Monitor Business View will become more relevant. Our categories and groups will appear here for us to get granular information around our objects within those groups. Later in the document we will create a category called “Test Lab,” here we can see the category already and the servers it will contain.



We can drill down into the individual machines and look at all the metrics listed across the top of the diagram; Summary, Alarms, Overall, CPU, Memory, Network, Datastores, Virtual Disks, Top VMs and Tasks and Events. Below is an individual VM and its current usage.

The main purpose of Business View inside the Monitor suite is for quick access to performance statistics and monitoring near real-time performance at a granular level. Business View Groups can also have alarms assigned to them make the alarms more granular and pertinent to a particular group.

Data protection view

Another section where monitoring is important is the Data Protection View, here we can see quickly and easily each level of the infrastructure we are protecting.

The Data Protection View tree displays a hierarchical list of connected Veeam Backup Enterprise Manager servers, Veeam Backup & Replication servers and components of your backup infrastructure — backup proxies, backup repositories, WAN Accelerators, tape servers, cloud repositories and cloud gateways.



Each level of the hierarchy will offer different levels of information based off abilities of that level, in the diagram above we see only a summary, alarms raised and jobs. We can see on the right some alarm has been raised around the VBR.RINDER.LOCAL server. We see the error travels down the chain to the level it has been triggered on. This gives us a high level alarm system if there is no hierarchy expanded and we will still see attention is required (we can also configure an email or alarm triggered in the alarm if we wish, using the alarms section).

On selection of the lowest level in the tree and choosing the alarm tab, we can see the cause of the alarm and a warning. As per all Veeam alarms, the bottom section will show the knowledge base and the alarm trigger to aid remediation of any issue raised.

On the right side of the page as per the below diagram we can see a link to both Acknowledge the alarm and Resolve it.

Acknowledging the alarm will enable us to put a comment into the alarm to show we have seen and dealt with the error. Below we can see the icon change for an acknowledgement.



Resolving the alarm will also allow a box for comments, however it will then clear the alarm from the alarms window and return the status to all green. Here we can see a resolved alarm.

And finally, we can see the red crosses have disappeared from the hierarchy.

If we move down the hierarchy now to the repositories we start to see how data protection monitoring can help towards planning. Here we can see a summary of the repository and also a trending of capacity.



Moving along to the VMs tab, we can see what VMs are stored in the chosen repositories and how many restore points they contain.

Again, if we move to the Proxy group we can see what loading they have been under.

And again, moving to an individual Proxy even more information.



In summary, both Data Protector View and Business View offer a quick and efficient way to see how your virtual infrastructure is working and resource utilization in near real-time alongside your backup infrastructure and how it is operating. Being able to capacity plan for repository storage at a glance and see where bottlenecks are located can help any organization become more streamlined.

The core difference with Veeam ONE is that the monitoring is constant and at the tip of your mouse, as the data changes the reporting will change to reflect the new requirements or plans.

Reporting from inside Veeam ONE monitorVeeam ONE Monitor has a small amount of general reports available from the interface without heading off into the Veeam ONE Business Reporter. Using a drop down list, we have around 100 reports we can run.

Many people assume these are the reports we talk about when we are discussing Veeam ONE reporting, however these are only a subset of at-your-disposal reports available through the Monitor and through the remote console. We must go to Veeam ONE Business Reporter to cover those reports properly.

I mention here the use of the console, many organizations install Veeam ONE on a server and never use the server to access the data, instead they install a remote console from the Veeam ONE installation media. When we install the whole package on the local server we include Veeam ONE Monitor, Veeam ONE reporter and Veeam ONE Business View. To access the other two programs uses different executables not accessible from Veeam ONE Monitor. The remote console does not give access to those two programs, however Veeam has made sure they are accessible through a web browser.

Here we will just go through a single report showing how simple it is to run and what depth of reporting is available.



We will use a Veeam Backup Files Growth report to view virtual machines and how they are changing.

When you select this report, it will open a web browser and start to look for relevant data. It will ask you what you actually want to report on at this point.

If we choose the backup job dropdown, we could choose that backup here and be much more granular on what we were going to look at.

If we wanted to include a specific backup in the virtual Infrastructure as indicated, we could select the link to that backup and pinpoint more accurately what we want. We will keep the default setting here.

On the right side, we see the Create report link to generate the chosen report. There is also a brief description of the content.



We are then presented with the five-page report (in this case) which shows the storage used in all the backups.

Each report runs in a similar way to this.

These are only the ones listed in Veeam ONE Monitor. We will cover Veeam ONE Business Reporter later in the document but please do not only use these reports.



In summary

Veeam ONE Monitor reporting is very efficient to get to fast accurate reports on all facets of your monitored infrastructure and data protection. It can provide basic reports based on an all-encompassing scope or can be granular down to individual VM, backup jobs or groups.

It is a vast offering from within the monitor program but should not be used as a replacement for Veeam ONE Business View.

Veeam ONE and performance

Something to think about here is the performance of Veeam ONE, depending on the scale of your infrastructure you would have sized your Veeam ONE as a typical or advanced deployment with the correct amount of resources which should be fine to keep things working hard for you in real-time monitoring.

We can adjust some settings to ensure data performs as expected once it hits your monitor host and does not start to be a bottleneck in the data flow.

Performance cache

Performance cache is space on disk to which Veeam ONE stores real-time performance data, as this data is collected. Performance data stored in cache is used for Veeam ONE Monitor dashboards and views. Disk-based performance cache allows you to significantly decrease RAM utilization on the machine that runs the Veeam ONE Server component.

When choosing a location for performance cache, consider the following recommendations:

• Make sure that the disk where the performance cache is located can quickly complete, read and write requests. Do not locate the cache remotely in networks with high latency values.

• For large monitoring environments, place the performance cache on an SSD local to the machine where the Veeam ONE Server component runs. For small and medium monitoring environments, an HDD is normally enough.

• Length of the performance cache folder path must not exceed the Windows Max Path Limitation value. For details, see https://msdn.microsoft.com/ru-ru/library/windows/desktop/aa365247(v=vs.85).aspx#maxpath.

• Make sure there is enough disk space for performance cache. The cache is cleared on an hourly basis, as new data is collected; however, in large monitoring environments it can take significant disk space. For example, in the Advanced Scalability Deployment mode, during peak loads, the cache can take up to 6 GB disk space for every 1000 VMs (a typical deployment of 1000 VMs will consume 3-5 GB with an extra 100 Mb for scalability).

The Performance Cache path is set as part of the installation process and should be installed on fast disk to help with data reads and collection, the cache is flushed periodically and refreshed so reliable disk is much better. Once installed and configured, the path to the cache can be changed by editing the registry. This would be useful if you have inserted new disks or a better location. Do not use a network or shared location if it can be avoided as it may introduce latency when reading and writing on the cache.

The Performance Cache path can be changed as follows but first stop the Veeam ONE Monitor Server service.

Run regedit and under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Veeam\Veeam ONE Monitor\Service create a REG_SZ value named DiskPerfCachePath, set the desired path (e.g. E:\VeeamONE\Cache).

https://msdn.microsoft.com/ru-ru/library/windows/desktop/aa365247(v=vs.85).aspx#maxpath



Data collection schedule

After you connect VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V and Veeam Backup & Replication servers, Veeam ONE will propagate the provided connection settings to all its components and will set up the default data collection configuration for you. This is as follows:

In Veeam ONE Monitor, the added servers will be added to the list of monitored objects. Data from the servers will be collected in the real-time mode.

In Veeam ONE Reporter and Business View, the connected servers will be added to the list of objects targeted for data collection. Data collection will be scheduled to run on weekdays, at 3 a.m. The first data collection session will start immediately after installation. You can customize the schedule according to which reporting and categorization data is collected in the Veeam ONE Reporter console. You can change the time and scheduling in Veeam Reporter Console configuration if these times do not suit your business.

Data collection mode

Data collection mode determines what metrics Veeam ONE will collect and specifies the product configuration in a number of areas. Choosing an appropriate data collection mode allows you to optimize monitoring and reporting performance and improve user experience in Veeam ONE. It is important to choose the right mode for your requirements or you could add extra complexity and resource usage when it is not needed. The Typical Deployment and Advanced Scalability Deployment modes are recommended for users who want to monitor and report on both the virtual environment and Veeam Backup & Replication infrastructure.

Optimized for Typical Deployment mode is recommended for small to medium environments up to 100 hosts and 1500 VMs. In this mode, Veeam ONE collects all inventory, configuration and performance metrics and makes collected data available in dashboards, reports and alarms. This mode provides the greatest data granularity level, but results in a greater load on the Veeam ONE server and a larger size of Veeam ONE database.

Optimized for Advanced Scalability Deployment mode is recommended for large environments with more than 100 hosts and 1500 VMs. In this mode, Veeam ONE collects all metrics required for alarms and reports. This mode results in a lower load on the Veeam ONE server and a smaller size of the Veeam ONE database.

The last mode is Backup Data Only mode. This mode is recommended for users who want to focus on Veeam Backup & Replication monitoring and reporting and do not need a deep visibility of the virtual infrastructure.

In this mode, Veeam ONE collects all inventory, configuration and performance metrics from Veeam Backup & Replication servers. It also collects inventory and configuration metrics from virtual infrastructure servers, but skips virtual infrastructure performance metrics. As a result, Veeam ONE dashboards, reports and alarms display backup-related data only.

In this mode, VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V objects’ performance data is not available .

This mode results in the least possible size of the Veeam ONE database and the lowest load on the Veeam ONE server.

You can change the mode settings in Veeam ONE with the following method:

Navigate along the top to Options and Server Options, once the window opens navigate to the last tab which is Other Settings, select the Launch button near the bottom right.



In the new window that appears select the Scalability link on the right-hand side and the options will appear for you to select your required radio button.

Now save your new settings. These will take effect the next time the collection will run, according to your chosen schedule.

Making changes here can help make your Veeam ONE deployment more efficient in the way it works and the speed it can show you data in reports and dashboards.

Now that we have the basic setup customized to suit your actual infrastructure, we can look at Categories in Business View. This will allow reporting and monitoring based off a set of groups and categories rather than just a list of hierarchical objects.



How to get the best from business viewBusiness View allows us to look at categorizing our infrastructure to match the segmentation of a business department. We may have many clusters, hosts or VMs, however we need some way to break them down into manageable portions allowing for reporting, scheduling or monitoring.

Business View is accessed by a webpage. The link is on your desktop. When people install Veeam ONE, Business View and Business Reporter are also installed and desktop links are added to each service.

On opening you will see a basic layout with a dashboard of tabs.

The function of Business view is slightly different from the function of Veeam ONE monitor or Veeam ONE Reporter in that we generally do not use this on a day to day basis, we use the functionality to control departments or project allocation of Clusters, Hosts, Storage and VM’s.

The opening dashboard actually shows you a level of categorization of your infrastructure.

This shows at a glance that work needs to be done and at what level to start to categorize.

The core level of work is done in the configuration tab. This tab shows items such as categories, groups, options and rules. The categories are where we will start as this is where we create the relevant departmental or projects headers.

Remember the function of this service is to be able to split out for reporting and scheduling purposes smaller areas of the business and pigeonhole custom services into groups.



From the screenshot, you can see we have some predefined categories. These are used by Veeam ONE monitor and Business Reporter and although created, will not necessarily be populated.

We should add a category for a project named “Test Lab.” Select “Add” and the new category box will open. Enter “Test_Lab” or a relevant name for your category. You can select what type of object this category will be relevant to, however in this we will choose Virtual Machine. Leave the radio button to static and select the “OK” button. This will add the new category.

You can select what type of object this category will be relevant to, however in this we will choose Virtual Machine, leave the radio button to static and select the “OK” button. This will add the new category.



Once we have created a category we need to create groups that will be part of that category. We will do this on the groups link which will now show a list of the categories available.

We can see we have no groups here so we will use the add button to create a set of groups. We will create an admin group for DC’s, an application group for an SQL server and a Test_VM group for the dev boxes.

Now we have a way to break down out VMs (in this case) to get granular information moving forward. Now, move on to the Workspace tab along the top. Here we will add the VMs (on this occasion) to the groups and categories.



We can now see the category “Test Lab” in the columns with all VMs as “Uncategorized.” We need to select the “VAO-Test-x” servers listed below as a single item or using shift multi-select. On the right side of the page we see the “Edit Categories” button, select this to enter the editor.



Now we can see all the categories attributed to the virtual machines with Test Lab listed.

Using the drop-down selector for Test Lab we can adjust group membership of the selected VMs.

After selecting “Test_VMs” click OK, we can adjust other categories if we wish to at this point. Selecting OK will apply all changes made here.

Now that we have added the test machines to the group, we can use monitor to set alarms on the specific group or to report on a specific grouping.

First let’s make sure that the servers have been added to the group using the workspace tab.



If we now go to the VM tab and look for the Test Lab category we can see machine usage in resource usage is being monitored.

Now that we have seen how to create a group we can apply the same type of customization to any set of resources shown in Veeam ONE Business View. We can apply to clusters, hosts, storage and virtual machines. Using this tool enables us to be more specific when looking at any portion of our infrastructure. We can manipulate resources and group together like machines, development sections or project teamed servers.

The next section will show how this comes together and how we can use groups to see dashboard and reports based off granularity of what we choose in Veeam ONE Business View.



Veeam ONE business reporterThe real power of Veeam ONE lies in its ability to generate reports that are actually useful to a business. Using many methods of delivery including email reports based off schedules, alarms triggers and manual requests. The data is gathered using Veeam ONE monitor and there are over 300 pre-defined reports that cover any aspect of your virtual infrastructure and protected environment form this database.

Any report can be as high level as the whole infrastructure or as granular as the categories and groups you create in Veeam ONE Business View for a department or individual VM. There can also be a wide range in time from the first entry in your database to a range of minutes at any point of recorded data.

Some of the more powerful reports include:

• Usage

• Trending

• Planning

• Costs

• Tracking

• Assessments

• Configurations

• Monitoring

• Overviews

These general topics cover all areas of Business Reporter reporting.

The dashboards

We can break Veeam ONE Business reporter into two areas of use, the dashboards and the reports. Most people open the application and see the main screen thinking it’s just a dashboard:



Selecting any of these dashboards will take you into the dashboard and the widgets it contains and this is great if you get to monitor these each day or have a dedicated screen. The real power now is in the small three-line icon in the top right of each dashboard.

When we log in with admin credentials, we will see a full complement of options, the pre-defined dashboards are limited in what you can edit. However, you can create your own dashboards and have full control with them.

If we select the add dashboard sign in the top right hand of the screen we can design our own custom dash.

Enter your new dashboard name and description if required. You also have the option of how many columns you wish at this point. You will end up with the below dashboard. If you choose three columns you will see three plus signs.



Selecting the large plus sign in the middle will open a window for you to choose which widgets you require in your dashboard.

To get our dashboard custom running, I will add a couple of widgets. When setting it up, choose whichever widgets you wish to include in your own custom dashboard.



I have added three columns with four widgets in the dashboard view.

These are quick views that will change based on the data in the database every three hours by default.

Back on the front page we can see that our new dashboard has been added to the bottom of the list, by dragging it to the top I can reposition my dashboard anywhere in the group. We can also change the front picture by clicking the small three stripes in the top right corner and choosing set image.

Now is where the power starts to come in, select your dashboard and open it up. Choose one of your widgets which will show a quick view, now hit the three stripes in the top right corner of the widget and select View full report.



The report wizard will start enabling you to choose what you wish to see based off the widget you had selected.

Select the “Create Report” link on the right side after choosing your report period.



Our drill down report now gives us a more in-depth report from the dashboard which we can read, save or print out.

As we can see from the capacity planning dashboard, we get good information based off your own unique infrastructure, how it runs, what your trends are and how they will manifest in regard to your environment.

So, the dashboard will have pre-defined widget content based around a structured category or you can choose to develop your own to use. You can also control who sees the dashboards and which ones they see.

Dashboard scheduling

The most powerful ability of the dashboards is the scheduling tasks you can align to any dashboard. You have in dashboards the ability to schedule a dashboard to be sent via email to anyone you wish at a time and date that suits you.

On the main dashboard page, select the three stipes in the top right of the dashboard and select Scheduling.



The scheduling dashboard will open and we can add a new recipient to where we want to send the dashboard and when we can have multiple target addresses or multiple schedules configured for the same dashboard. We can even have the dashboard sent to a share for another application to use.

If we click the top link to “Schedule on” we are taken to a page to choose timings. These can be as short as an hour or daily at a set time with the ability to choose a specific time and day of the week.



We can also choose monthly. The monthly option is very granular and offers many options such as day, number of months, days of the week, weeks of the month and of course which months. A wizard will take you through the options ensuring it is as simple as select then next, next, next…



Once the schedule is selected, the next action is the recipient.



In the recipient options, we can see we have an array of choices we can customize from the actual recipient delivery format. If we go to the advanced button locations and scripts:

Once configured and applied we are taken back to the scheduling page where we can see our set schedule and if required add another recipient or schedule to the same dashboard or edit any existing schedules we have set.

One other action we can apply is “Disable” schedule, this gives us the option to disable rather than delete a schedule for whatever reason. Let’s say the recipient leaves and no one takes their place but will do so in the future. Disable the job and leave it in the scheduler, then when the new recipient is decided and you only have to edit the schedule with the new email address and enable the schedule again.



At the scheduled time an email will be sent with the latest updates on the dashboard content and a link enabling you to go to the dashboard directly (authentication required).

Summary of reports

So, in summary the dashboards look good but not very practical for people on the move. The ability to customize your own dashboards makes the application that much more powerful a tool for reporting on your infrastructure. Add to this the ability to schedule actions for your report dashboards and turn a static reporting tool into a regular and mobile reporting tool. You do not have to miss any changes that occur or changes in capacity that may not be the actions of intentional maintenance. No one needs to be unaware of what is happening and even the finance teams can now get a weekly, monthly or quarterly understanding of how and who is using IT services and infrastructure.

Workspace and Reports

The second part of Veeam ONE Business Reporter is the Workspace and the hundreds of reports it contains. When you choose the Workspace tab in Business Reporter you will see a list of folders on the left side which contain all your reports categorized into specific areas:



As you will see, Veeam has supplied a lot of reports in many folders which on first impression will look very daunting. However, this is the default setup which supplies all the tools for you to build a reporting system based on as many or as few reports as you wish.

The two folders we are really interested in at this point are the top folder “My Reports” and the second form at the bottom “All Deployment Projects.” These are really the two folders you will be looking at regularly.

We will start from the bottom as this is the simplest to explain.



All deployments projects folder

All Deployments Projects folder is where you can test new additional hosts or VM’s to test plans and report the effects of changes based off current trends in your environment.

Initially, we can see the Add button and threshold button. By selecting the Threshold button we are shown a list of thresholds that are used as part of the analysis. Enter you own infrastructure settings that meet your working criteria.



Once that is complete you can close the setting by using OK and your thresholds are saved for each analysis. Now we need to choose what we want to analyze and on what resource. Hitting the Add button gives us a simile wizard to add out test criteria.

First, we need to add a name for the project, then choose a level to apply it too (I have chosen my data center in VMware) and the datastore it will be placed into. I have also set a date at the bottom that this would definitely be completed by.

Now, I should select the Edit button by the right side of Scenario to add a plan against criteria.

When the scenario box opens press the add button to start the add item wizard.



Here we can start to add relevant machines or hosts to our scenario. This can be multiple items in the full scenario, however we add items one at a time to ensure the item is correct. For our purposes we will be adding a virtual machine. Here I have chosen an existing MSSQL server as my VM that I will be adding, assuming the same usage trends as that machine.

Select finish to go back to the edit scenario page and we will see a VM has now been added. Add as many as required here to get the desired scenario.



When you have the right amount of desired hosts or virtual machines, finish the edit by selecting OK. This will take you to the Add project wizard and select OK once again. We are now at the All Deployments Projects folder. The project is now listed and if we select it we will see the build button will become active on the upper row. Let’s build the scenario and see the how it fares.

And after the build is complete

This tells us the effect of the project would be successful, now it has been checked we can leave it in the list and if circumstances change we can edit the project. If the project is now finished we can complete the project and it will remove it from the list as it is no longer required. We also now have the View Report button that is active, this is only active after we have built the project. The report will give us fine details on the effect our project will have on the environment. In this case a three-page report is generated listing the effects.



There is a warning on this project that tells us we will exceed the storage threshold of 80%, it is a warning only.

So the All project dashboard can be a powerful planning tool for new deployments or trending forcasts based off additional resources or even helping decide on what to purchase to get the most from your investment.

My reports folder

The next and most imortant folder is the “My Reports” folder, this is where most of your useful reports will be kept and used. The other folders all contain the predefined templates for any form of report you could require from Veeam ONE monitoring and there are plenty to go round. What you really want is a collection of reports that are relevant to you and your organization; reports that you can manipulate and distibute in the right way to the right people. The My Reports folder gives you this option.

When it is first installed the folder is empty, what we have to do is find relevant reports that we are intereted in on a regular basis and customize them for your needs. We will use a Datastore Performance Report from the Vmware Monitoring folder for this to go through this example.



This is a predefined report but the options can be configured to give a cutsomized report on spefic datastores in our environment. When it opens we will have the base template to work with. We will select the choose link and select the Datastores we are interested in.

This will open the datastore browser to select in our case the primary datastore. An then click Ok.



Then we will selet the other options we are interested in on the main report page, interval or start date and business hours if applicable. Once we have selected all our options we can use the Save As or Preview bottons on the right side of the screen. The preview button will give us the report based off what we asked for but it is a one time run. With this button, each time you want to run the report you will need to reselect your chosen options and then preview once again.

By saving your report you will now have a defined report that can be run straght away without any changes and a lot more.

When we use “Save As” it will open a new report save wizard. We name it and if required give a description of what the report is, then save it. It will be default saved into another My Reports folder.



Now you can start to make my reports work for you, in the default folders there are no options apart form Preview and “Save As.” That’s because these are basic templates that should not be changed. Now you have a new report that is unique and pre-set. If you select the report and open it we will have a slightly different set of options.



In this version of the report options you will see the main parameters are non editable, which is different than previously seen. However, on the right side we now have a list of useful things we can do to the report. These include:

• Viewing the report

• Editing the content of the report

• Copy the report as a duplicate

• Delete the report

• Report URL (to send a link to someone on the same network so they can also view it)

• Schedule the report to run and email to a group or person

• Rename

• Edit the description

• Move it to another folder or publish the report to a dashboard

The options are self explanatory, however lets look at the most useful tool which is the schedule feature. This enables us to choose a time or date (same as the previously covered scheduler in dashboards) and a recipient to send it too.

We also have the option of the content in this sceduler which will send a PDF, Excel document or a Word document enabling the recipient to recieve in a format that suits their need.



Veeam ONE suite summaryVeeam Availability Suite protects virtual and physical environments from disaster in many ways, it is exceptional at doing what it does best which is protection of critical and non-critical services.

Veeam ONE is part of the Availability Suite and is made up of Veeam applications that come together to deliver reporting, monitoring and structure to any supported Virtual environment that uses or in some cases does not use the full Veeam Availability solutions.

Overlooking the main Availability product allows Veeam ONE to see everything that is happening in the environment. Alarm systems are fully configurable to meet the needs of any organization and monitor in real-time. Triggers which can not only send alerts but can use scripts to execute more than a warning or SNMP trap. Adapting to changes in the IT world such as ransomware can be tough for some monitoring software but here are quickly added to the list of alarms Veeam ONE is able to monitor for.

The real power of Veeam ONE lies in its flexibility to meet any organizational need for reporting and monitoring at this level. Categorization provides granular levels of distinction to understand even the smallest components in your environment.

Once installed and without any more configuration, Veeam ONE is fully useable. However, by using the content of this document hopefully it will enable you to start to get more from the package and learn how to harness the power it has at its disposal.

Like any great machine Veeam ONE has power in its engine, it just needs a little knowledge to get the best out of it to meet your needs.



Paul Szelesi is the Solutions Architect Manager for Veeam in EMEA. He is based in the UK and is focused on technologies around VMware and Hyper-V. He has more than 20 years of experience in the field working with storage and virtualisation products. He managed projects as small as single servers to large storage implementations in the enterprise space. His current focus is on Veeam product implementation and designing infrastructures for customers.

Specialties: VMware Virtualisation, Microsoft Virtualisation, Backup, EqualLogic, Dell Storage, HP Storage, NetApp

About Veeam SoftwareVeeam® recognizes the new challenges companies across the globe face in enabling the Always-On Business™, a business that must operate 24.7.365. To address this, Veeam has pioneered a new market of Availability for the Always-On Enterprise™ by helping organizations meet recovery time and point objectives (RTPO™) of < 15 minutes for all applications and data, through a fundamentally new kind of solution that delivers high-speed recovery, data loss avoidance, verified protection, leveraged data and complete visibility. Veeam Availability Suite™, which includes Veeam Backup & Replication™, leverages virtualization, storage, and cloud technologies that enable the modern data center to help organizations save time, mitigate risks, and dramatically reduce capital and operational costs.

Founded in 2006, Veeam currently has 49,000 ProPartners and more than 255,000 customers worldwide. Veeam‘s global headquarters are located in Baar, Switzerland, and the company has offices throughout the world. To learn more, visit http://www.veeam.com.

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