Wednesday, February 1, 2023

Five Reasons to Monitor Your Infrastructure with Veeam ONE

 Veeam ONE (VONE) is the monitoring tool for your backup environment and not only. You can use it as well to gain visibility into your virtual infrastructure. And when you think at the features it provides out of the box such as proactive alerting, monitoring, reporting, capacity planning, chargeback, intelligent automation and diagnostics you understand the value it brings to your environment. But what got me so excited about Veeam ONE? Well, it was this:



It is a screen shot from VONE monitoring my lab environment. It's not the fact that there are alarms that got my attention. It is actually what each of those alarms is describing.

Let's look closer. Veeam ONE is monitoring in this case Veeam Backup & Replication server from my personal lab. Upon a quick look at the screenshot you will notice there are 5 different issue displayed. Some are errors, others just warnings. In both cases, these would prove to be critical if ignored in a production environment.

1. Backup repository connection failure 

My scale out backup repository has a capacity tier in Google Cloud Storage. The S3 bucket is not accessible anymore. This alarm triggers by default when the repo is not accessible for more than 5 minutes. 

2. Backup job state 

This alarm is looking at the state of all backup jobs. The backup job has ended with a error because the vSphere tags where deleted from vCenter Server. So no more backups for those VMs. 

3. Suspicious incremental backup size

This is one of the out of the box alarms that can help you in case of a ransomware attacks. It looks at changes in size between incremental backups and it triggers to let you know you should further investigate what's happening. 

4. Job disabled

There are disabled backup jobs. This can be on purpose or by mistake. In any situation, as a backup admin you would like to know if there are any and which they are. The predefined time before the alarm is triggered is 12 hours. More, this alarm has remediation actions. You just need to press "Approve Action" enter a comment and Veeam ONE will enable back the job. How cool is that!


Once the action is executed successfully and the job enabled in VBR, the status changes to let you know


5. Immutability state

Seems that even if I am using S3 compatible storage, immutability flag has not been set. In today's cybersecurity context, this is one small configuration that should be applied to all your repositories. Keep your backups protected from any type of modification. 

Conclusion 

These are only 5 alarms out of hundreds in Veeam ONE that help you keep your IT infrastructure operating securely. The alarms are all coming out of the box, but you can customize them and create your own. As I stated above, any of the issues highlighted by the alarms will prove critical in case of a situation arising. So it's better to catch and solve them pro-actively. 





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