Monitoring data center performance is an essential part of every IT administrator’s job that shouldn’t be overlooked. There are many avenues you can go down when looking at a tool to help monitor performance, but with Veeam, you can do this with Veeam ONE. Veeam ONE has many capabilities, but one of the most important features is the alarm it triggers when part of your virtual environment isn’t working as it should. Pre-built alarms included in Veeam ONE keep IT administrators up-to-date on the operations and issues occurring in their environment in real-time. With over 200 pre-built alarms included in Veeam ONE, users can identify, troubleshoot and react to any issue that may affect critical applications and business operations. Predefined alarms monitor VMware vSphere and vCloud Director, Microsoft Hyper-V, Veeam Cloud Connect and any internal Veeam ONE issues.
Data collection in Veeam ONE occurs immediately after connecting to your virtual center, ESXi hosts, Hyper-V hosts or Veeam Backup & Replication servers. Alarms are based on a set of best practices used to benchmark in comparison with your environment and trigger an alarm when metrics are not aligned. Once an alarm is triggered, users will see details and information in the Veeam ONE console. Some alarms can be resolved manually when triggered and others can be resolved automatically. It is important to note you can modify alarms to fit your business. This includes editing rules, assigning alarms to different objects or creating actions for when certain alarms fire off. Actions created include receiving an email alert on the issue or instructing Veeam ONE to run a script once an alarm is triggered. Within the alarm settings, users can change thresholds or aggregation allowing you to tailor the alarms to fit your business.
Fig. 1: Alarm settings
The Alarm settings wizard is shown above. This wizard allows you to adjust the alarm, add different rules to the alarm, enable actions to happen once the alarm has been triggered and allow users to add custom notes on how to resolve the alarm in the knowledge base section. With simple changes, you can set the alarm criteria to be customized for certain servers without affecting other counters in Veeam ONE.
VMware vSphere alarms
There are many Veeam ONE built-in alarms that detect issues in VMware vSphere infrastructure components. The alarms include alert on everything from the vCenter Server, to clusters and hosts, and all the way down to datastores and virtual machines. Veeam ONE will also look at vCloud Director vApps, organization and more.
Fig. 2: Monitor view of alarms
An important VMware alarm that Veeam ONE will trigger is Host connection failure. As the name states, this alarm monitors VMware vCenter Server API for events indicating that a host is disconnected. Similarly, alarms such as Host available memory will inform you when the host is low on memory or Host CPU usage when CPU usage has exceeded the defined threshold. As mentioned previously, there are alarms to detect issues with virtual machines. Some of these include Orphaned VM backup snapshot, High Memory Usage and Heartbeat missing. Along with an alarm to detect high memory usage on the host, there is a High balloon memory utilization alarm notifying you if there is an increased consumption of the VMware Tools memory controller, also known as the “balloon driver,” within a VM.
VMware alarms also detect if there are VMs in your environment that have no backups/replicas. This can help ensure that you are meeting SLAs and will be notified if your backup/replica are not meeting defined recovery point objectives (RPOs).
A notable alarm included in Veeam ONE is the Possible ransomware activity alarm, which detects if there is any suspicious activity occurring on the VM. These VMware alarms — plus much more — will provide visibility into your data center to ensure Availability for your business.
Fig. 3: Ransomware alarm details
Veeam Backup & Replication alarms
There are many alarms to help detect issues within your virtual infrastructure, but there are also alarms for your data protection operations. Alarms are configured to warn about events or issues that can cause data loss or prevent Veeam Backup & Replication from working properly. Alarms detect connectivity issues, state of Veeam Backup & Replication components, failing jobs or jobs finishing with warnings, any configuration issues, long running jobs plus much more. Veeam ONE can even detect if your backup repository is running out of free space, which is shown with the Backup Repository Free Space alarm.
Fig. 4: Veeam Backup & Replication monitoring
Conclusion
Alarms identify if something isn’t working properly in your environment, allowing you to quickly resolve and troubleshoot the issue. Veeam ONE provides visibility into the data center to ensure healthy operations for your business. This blog post describes just some of the alarms included in Veeam ONE, but there are many more to help ensure your data center is operating as it should. Veeam ONE is a great tool to utilize in your business, not only for the alarms, but also provides monitoring, reporting and business view categorization.
If you want to learn more about Veeam ONE and how it provides visibility to the Always-On Business, check out some of the following resources:
