The Power of Veeam ONE Alarms

If you have never heard of Veeam ONE, you are missing out on some great functionality.  Veeam ONE is part of the Veeam Availability Suite, which is the combination or Veeam Backup & Replication and Veeam ONE.  Veeam ONE is your one stop shop for monitoring and alerting on not only the health of your Veeam environment, but your workloads as well.

Today I want to take a look one of the ways Veeam ONE provides data, and what you can do with some of this information.  There are so many different ways to get data from Veeam ONE, such as one of the standard or even a customized report in Veeam ONE Reporter, or alarms in Veeam ONE Monitor.

I want to start by talking about Alarms in Veeam ONE Monitor, since you can also generate Veeam ONE Reports on your alarms!  How cool is that?  There are many things you can do with Veeam ONE alarms.  Besides preconfigured and ready to use alarms, you can also create custom alarms to make sure you are getting the data you really want to see from Veeam ONE.

Alarms in Veeam ONE Monitor

Alarms in Veeam ONE are Veeam ONE’s way of telling you something is happening in  your environment.  The event it is notifying you about could be a good thing, bad thing, or purely informational depending on how you have your alarms set up in Veeam ONE.  Besides the huge number of alarms that come with Veeam ONE out of the box you can also set your own custom alarms.

Here are the types of Assets that can be used as Alarm sources in Veeam ONE:

Each of these categories has alarms within them.  You can find the complete listing of available alarms in the Veeam ONE Working With Alarms Guide here.  You will also notice at the very bottom of the Backup & Replication Category is a item called Intelligent Diagnostics, which is new to Veeam ONE 9.5 Update 4.  If you are not familiar with Veeam Intelligent Diagnostics, be sure to take a look at my top three favorite Veeam Availability Suite 9.5 Update 4 features, Veeam Intelligent Diagnostics is one of them!
On the chance you cannot find the exact alarm you are looking for, they are easy to create, and ensure you are getting exactly the data you are looking for.

Creating a Custom Alarm in Veeam ONE

Also in the Veeam ONE Working With Alarms Guide is your compete guide on how to create an alarm in Veeam ONE.  It is very easy to do, and here is an example of an alarm I created the other day.  From the left navigation pane, select the type of asset you want to create an alarm for.  In this case, I want to create an alarm for Virtual Machines.

Then in the left navigation pane, under Actions, select New.  As you can see there are many other things you can do with an alarm such as edit it or copy it.

Now is where things start getting fun.  This is where you can really customize your alarm.  Here are all the different aspects of an alarm you can modify:

Of course, make sure you give your alarm a name that makes sense.  Another good place to spend time is the Knowledge Base section, so you can enter information about what your alarm is reporting on, and why.  This will be helpful to operations teams who are receiving the alert.

Which brings me to my next point of Veeam ONE Alarm Notifications.

As you can see, we have many many options for notifications on a single Veeam ONE Alarm, and can get very granular, and have multiple notification types sent on a single alarm.

Coupled with this is the Assignment tab.  You can assign a Veeam ONE alarm to an asset in a number of different ways, such as by the Infrastructure View infrastructure tree which would let you navigate through your environment by vCenter, vSphere Cluster, ESXi host, etc, or by Veeam ONE Business View categorizations.

Veeam ONE Business View categorizations have been completely revamped in Veeam ONE 9.5 Update 4, making them even easier to use than ever.  Veeam ONE Business View categorizations are a quick and easy way to group your virtual machines logically, such as by location, application, or whatever other criteria works best for your environment.  Assigning alarms based on Veeam ONE Business view helps you to make sure you are alerting on the most relevant, and important aspects of your infrastructure.

The Importance of Veeam ONE Notifications

Configuring notifications correctly for your Veeam ONE environment can be one of the most important aspects of how the environment functions.  Notifications only work if there is attention being paid to them.  Notification and event management is different for every organization, but here are some things to think about when it comes to Veeam ONE.

Who is logging into Veeam ONE?  Is it the backup team?  The virtualization team?  The operations team?  And how often are they looking at the console?

What are the most important things you want to know about your environment?  For these things, you may want to have multiple alerts to make sure they are received and processed accordingly.

Are you using SNMP in your environment?  If so, be sure to set up a trap for alarms you care about.

Veeam ONE Alarms can tell you almost anything you want about your environment.  For example, there is an alarm available for VM guest reboot, but is that relevant to the people looking at the Veeam ONE console?  It may or may not be, and its relevancy will be different for each and every environment.

You can also configure alarm suppression for a given alarm.  For example, if I know all virtual machines are being patched and rebooted Friday at 8PM to 11PM, I may want to suppress the alarm for VM guest reboot during this time:

Veeam ONE Alarm Rules

Custom Veeam ONE alarms are powered by easy to create rules, and you can have multiple rules per alarm.  Simply click on Add in the rules window, and pick the relevant trigger type.  There are lots of interesting things you can do by playing with a combination of rules in Veeam ONE, so make sure to take some time to poke around, and even create some sample alarms to get used to the way things work.

Veeam ONE Alarm Actions

Veeam ONE is really smart, and wants to make your life easier when it makes sense.  That is why there is the actions tab, to allow you to run scripts based on an alarm being triggered.  You can set this to Automatic, where it just happens, or Manual, where human intervention is required to take action.

The Power of Veeam ONE Custom Alarms

After I have finished configuring my alarm, I can see it in the alarm management pane.  If I click on the person icon next to filters, I can see all of my custom alarms in one place.

I created this particular alarm to alert me if the number of services running on a VM increases.  When it comes to assigning this alarm, I may want to assign it to every VM in my environment (which could create many alarms and notifications), or just on a particular subset of applications using Veeam ONE Business View categorizations.

With Veeam ONE, the possibilities of tailoring not only the built in alarms but custom alarms to meet your requirements are endless.  Alarms are just one component of Veeam ONE.  Another powerful part of Veeam ONE is Veeam ONE Reporter that provides a number of built in reports, and the ability to once again customize things to get the exact data you need from your Veeam ONE environment.  Stay tuned for more tips and tricks on how you can make Veeam ONE work for you!