• EN

Monitoring Veeam Backup Server with Checkmk

wolff.mateus
Userlevel 7
Badge +11

Frequently I'm ask in how to monitor backup jobs of Veeam externally Veeam servers.

I know that we can do this easy with Veeam One. But here I’m going to show you a solution to monitor backup jobs having only a Veeam Backup Server (without VEM or VONE).

So, the application I’m talking about is Checkmk. Checkmk is a monitoring software usually used on NOC (Network Operations Center) environments. However, this is an easy tool to deploy and very light to hav in our backup environment.

 

Versions

Checkmk has a free and commercial version:

Checkmk Raw Edition (CRE) – Free and 100% Open Source. It even incorporates Nagios into its core. You can use it to monitor entire environments. Support for this release is available through the Checkmk community forum.

Checkmk Enterprise Free Edition (CFE) – version already based on the standard edition, with Checkmk Micro Core (CMC), which means that it is no longer based on Nagios and is aimed at small IT environments with a single site and up to 25 monitored hosts.

Checkmk Enterprise Standard Edition (CEE) – similar to Free Edition without limitation on number of hosts. It has many dashboards to incorporate into dashboards and reports. For the Standard Edition, you can optionally receive professional support from us or one of our partners.

Checkmk Enterprise Managed Services Edition (CME) – is the version that works as a sort of multi-customer compatible extension of the Standard Edition that, through distributed monitoring, has all the necessary functions to operate a single individual Checkmk site for each one of the various independent customers.

 

Installation

You can download and install de raw easily on the oficial site checking the manual steps. I install it on a Linux Debian and only 5 commands were necessary to have my Checkmk running and ready to use:

 

Monitoring Servers

To monitor your servers, you need to install Checkmk agents and after that you need to register all of them inside Checkmk:

 

Monitoring Veeam

To monitor Veeam you only need to install Checkmk Windows agent like all others Windows server.

The agent windows have a several native plugins that you can used to complement your monitoring.

It has a Veeam plugin one C:\Program Files (x86)\checkmk\service\plugins that you need to copy to C:\ProgramData\checkmk\agent\plugins. The name of file plugin is veeam_backup_status.ps1:

 

Resulting

At the end you can see the last result of your backups jobs:

 

IT Lover | Veeam Vanguard | VUG Leader | Blogger

25 comments

JMeixner
Userlevel 7
Badge +17

Yes, CheckMK is a fine tool for monitoring. It can monitor most things out of the box.
We use it a lot.

Jochen (Joe) Meixner | Veeam Vanguard 2024 | Veeam Legend 2021 - 2023 | Veeam Certified Architect (VMCA) 2022 | Twitter: @JoMeix | BlueSky: @jmeixner.bsky.social
Chris.Childerhose
Userlevel 7
Badge +20

Interesting looking software.  Going to download and play around with this one.  😋

Chris Childerhose - VMCA2022 | VMCE2023 | Veeam Vanguard 7* | Veeam Legend 3* | vExpert 5* | VCAP-DCV/VCP-DCV | Object First Ace | Cisco Champion | Twitter: @cchilderhose | Blog Site – https://just-virtualization.tech
cymon
Userlevel 5
Badge +3

@wolff.mateus  Seems to be a very interesting software that I have to test in my lab 😎

Andanet
Userlevel 7
Badge +10

I used an oldest version of Zabbix to monitor VBR server and a community made script for all backup jobs. With version 6 Zabbix is possible to use VEEAM API to check all infrastructure and jobs from VBR or from EM. 

Antonio D'Andrea | VCP6-DCV | VMCE 2021 | VMCA 2022 | VMTSP2023 | Veeam Legend 2023 | VUG Italy Leader | I want it written on my tombstone "Please start a restore to the last valid backup"
Chris.Childerhose
Userlevel 7
Badge +20

I used an oldest version of Zabbix to monitor VBR server and a community made script for all backup jobs. With version 6 Zabbix is possible to use VEEAM API to check all infrastructure and jobs from VBR or from EM. 

Yeah, we use Zabbix for most of our monitoring, but I am testing another application called Backup Eagle which seems to be very good for monitoring Veeam as well.  😎

Chris Childerhose - VMCA2022 | VMCE2023 | Veeam Vanguard 7* | Veeam Legend 3* | vExpert 5* | VCAP-DCV/VCP-DCV | Object First Ace | Cisco Champion | Twitter: @cchilderhose | Blog Site – https://just-virtualization.tech
JMeixner
Userlevel 7
Badge +17

Backup Eagle seems to be interesting, because it supports more product than Veeam.
But I was not able to determine any price ranges for this product up to now….

Jochen (Joe) Meixner | Veeam Vanguard 2024 | Veeam Legend 2021 - 2023 | Veeam Certified Architect (VMCA) 2022 | Twitter: @JoMeix | BlueSky: @jmeixner.bsky.social
Chris.Childerhose
Userlevel 7
Badge +20

Backup Eagle seems to be interesting, because it supports more product than Veeam.
But I was not able to determine any price ranges for this product up to now….

Yeah, they do as I am testing it with Dell Networker and also Data Domain monitoring.  They have been really great at responding to issues, errors, etc.  Recommend contacting them about doing a trial.  😎

Chris Childerhose - VMCA2022 | VMCE2023 | Veeam Vanguard 7* | Veeam Legend 3* | vExpert 5* | VCAP-DCV/VCP-DCV | Object First Ace | Cisco Champion | Twitter: @cchilderhose | Blog Site – https://just-virtualization.tech
wolff.mateus
Userlevel 7
Badge +11

I used an oldest version of Zabbix to monitor VBR server and a community made script for all backup jobs. With version 6 Zabbix is possible to use VEEAM API to check all infrastructure and jobs from VBR or from EM. 

Yeah, we use Zabbix for most of our monitoring, but I am testing another application called Backup Eagle which seems to be very good for monitoring Veeam as well.  😎

Do you have link of this?

IT Lover | Veeam Vanguard | VUG Leader | Blogger
wolff.mateus
Userlevel 7
Badge +11

I used an oldest version of Zabbix to monitor VBR server and a community made script for all backup jobs. With version 6 Zabbix is possible to use VEEAM API to check all infrastructure and jobs from VBR or from EM. 

Zabbix is a nice tool too. What I most like on Checkmk is the simplicity to set it up.

In a few minutes you have your VBR monitored.

IT Lover | Veeam Vanguard | VUG Leader | Blogger
Chris.Childerhose
Userlevel 7
Badge +20

I used an oldest version of Zabbix to monitor VBR server and a community made script for all backup jobs. With version 6 Zabbix is possible to use VEEAM API to check all infrastructure and jobs from VBR or from EM. 

Yeah, we use Zabbix for most of our monitoring, but I am testing another application called Backup Eagle which seems to be very good for monitoring Veeam as well.  😎

Do you have link of this?

Sure @wolff.mateus, here you go - BACKUP EAGLE® - www.schmitz-rz-consult.de

Chris Childerhose - VMCA2022 | VMCE2023 | Veeam Vanguard 7* | Veeam Legend 3* | vExpert 5* | VCAP-DCV/VCP-DCV | Object First Ace | Cisco Champion | Twitter: @cchilderhose | Blog Site – https://just-virtualization.tech
dloseke
Userlevel 7
Badge +6

We’re using BackupRadar to monitor our backups.  Like Backup Eagle (which I haven’t looked into), it can gather backup info from multiple sources, either via API’s or via email notifications which it them parses.  We’re using it for VBR, Barracuda Cloud-to-Cloud, Barracuda Backup Appliances, Datto, I think Datto Backupify, and I believe it was working with StorageCraft ShadowProtect (and probably SPX).  It’s now a ScalePad product but seems to work alright.  It’s kind of confusing to me on setting up policies and such, but I don’t have to get into it all that often as our Service Desk does the monitoring and action items.

I will say that it does a decent job of parsing the job notification emails from Veeam, but since we have all of our VBR Deployments managed/monitored by the Service Provider Console, we have BackupRadar hitting the Service Provider Console via the API’s to monitor job’s as well.  Recently we had an issue with it failing to connect which seemed to be tied to the SPC v6 but I had also just upgrade to v7 recently and they were checking into it to make sure all was compatible.

Regardless, there’s a lot of great suggestions here for monitoring as well that I’ll have to check out.  Thanks!

Derek M. Loseke, Senior Systems Engineer | Veeam Legend 2022-2023 | VMSP/VMTSP | VCP6-DCV | VSP/VTSP | CCNA | https://technotesanddadjokes.com | @dloseke
Andanet
Userlevel 7
Badge +10

Backup Eagle seems to be interesting, because it supports more product than Veeam.
But I was not able to determine any price ranges for this product up to now….

Yeah, they do as I am testing it with Dell Networker and also Data Domain monitoring.  They have been really great at responding to issues, errors, etc.  Recommend contacting them about doing a trial.  😎

Aaaaaaargh…. Notworker….  🤣 I’m sure Backup Eagle is very good for different backup environments but all first level support wants to use a single dashboard. And it’s no free. 😆

Antonio D'Andrea | VCP6-DCV | VMCE 2021 | VMCA 2022 | VMTSP2023 | Veeam Legend 2023 | VUG Italy Leader | I want it written on my tombstone "Please start a restore to the last valid backup"
Iams3le
Userlevel 7
Badge +9

Great tool! Have used this tool in the past for monitoring, thanks for sharing. 

[Microsoft MVP | Veeam Legend 5* | VMware vExpert 4* | Cisco Champion 3* | Object First Ace]
BertrandFR
Userlevel 7
Badge +8

Hello, great article. We’re running Centreon in production, i tried using posh script in the past.

I wrote a post on the forum r&d why we use snmp traps and not posh script.

Feature Request Snmp Notifications for backup to tape job - R&D Forums (veeam.com)

“Maybe you can ask why not using powershell or API to check status of jobs? It's easier to for operator to deal with one line per jobs when it fails then open an incident case to l2 etc...
In the past i did the implementation with powershell but i faced many challenges:
- It was not pratical for operator to manage alarms when check jobs status contains all jobs, if one fails the check goes critical
- Create one check by one jobs dit not scale was tricky to manage in monitoring when a change occures in backup...
- When a major update of veeam was deployed, we had to refactor powershell scripts used because they were using deprecated librairies (modules).”

marco_s
Userlevel 7
Badge +7

Jorge de la Cruz is watching you.. 👀😅

Marco Sorrentino - Italy | System Engineer | VMCE & Veeam Lover
MarkBoothman
Userlevel 7
Badge +6

That's for the tip on backup eagle @Chris.Childerhose I’ll look into that and see how it compares to backup radar from an MSP point of view.

VMCA2022 | VMCE2021 | Veeam Legend | Twitter: @Boothy71
Chris.Childerhose
Userlevel 7
Badge +20

That's for the tip on backup eagle @Chris.Childerhose I’ll look into that and see how it compares to backup radar from an MSP point of view.

No problem at all.  It is a very easy setup and installing a small agent on the servers to monitor.  There are some caveats too.  I am going to be doing a blog series on it so will post those here too.  😎

If you contact them, you can reference me who mentioned it.  😉

Chris Childerhose - VMCA2022 | VMCE2023 | Veeam Vanguard 7* | Veeam Legend 3* | vExpert 5* | VCAP-DCV/VCP-DCV | Object First Ace | Cisco Champion | Twitter: @cchilderhose | Blog Site – https://just-virtualization.tech
jorge.delacruz
Userlevel 7
Badge +6

Fantastic article, mate! I always love a nice dark theme with metrics any day.

 

Keep up the great work.

Twitter: @jorgedlcruz / Web: https://jorgedelacruz.uk / vExpert: 2014-2022 / InfluxAce
jorge.delacruz
Userlevel 7
Badge +6

Jorge de la Cruz is watching you.. 👀😅

Hhahah I only watch to admire great work. You know I am a big fan of Grafana and other monitoring OSE tools, the more, the better. There is not a single product that gives you everything, but combining some, you can get the level of visibility/audit/compliance you need :)

Twitter: @jorgedlcruz / Web: https://jorgedelacruz.uk / vExpert: 2014-2022 / InfluxAce
marco_s
Userlevel 7
Badge +7

Jorge de la Cruz is watching you.. 👀😅

Hhahah I only watch to admire great work. You know I am a big fan of Grafana and other monitoring OSE tools, the more, the better. There is not a single product that gives you everything, but combining some, you can get the level of visibility/audit/compliance you need :)

Eheheh! 😋

I know..any good work is always appreciated!

Marco Sorrentino - Italy | System Engineer | VMCE & Veeam Lover
wolff.mateus
Userlevel 7
Badge +11

Jorge de la Cruz is watching you.. 👀😅

Hhahah I only watch to admire great work. You know I am a big fan of Grafana and other monitoring OSE tools, the more, the better. There is not a single product that gives you everything, but combining some, you can get the level of visibility/audit/compliance you need :)

Wise words!

IT Lover | Veeam Vanguard | VUG Leader | Blogger
J
Userlevel 1

Yes, CheckMK is a fine tool for monitoring. It can monitor most things out of the box.
We use it a lot.

Hey Jochen,

It’s always great to know that Checkmk meets the requirements.

Are you using the Enterprise or the RAW edition?

Best regards,

Alex

J
Userlevel 1

Interesting looking software.  Going to download and play around with this one.  😋

Hey Chris,

How your experience has been with Checkmk?

Let me know if you are considering the Enterprise if you don’t have one as Checkmk also have cloud now.

Best,

Alex

D
Badge

This looks very interesting but mostly for the solutions other than Veeam. We are using Veeam Enterprise Manager along with the PRTG sensors. This enables my team to get instant notifications on all our devices (Push notifications), completely customizable, set all the thresholds we need and more.

For example, we are setting not only last status, but we also set the Duration channel threshold so we know if a job (for example, replication jobs) is running for more than 2-3 hours there is likely an issue. Or, the last job run is set to alert us if there was no run within the needed period. For our NOC team we have also enabled autoacknowledge so the backup team does get alerted for backup issues but after 1-2 minutes the alerts are acknowledged automatically in PRTG so they don’t interfere with Systems monitoring.

 

wolff.mateus
Userlevel 7
Badge +11

This looks very interesting but mostly for the solutions other than Veeam. We are using Veeam Enterprise Manager along with the PRTG sensors. This enables my team to get instant notifications on all our devices (Push notifications), completely customizable, set all the thresholds we need and more.

For example, we are setting not only last status, but we also set the Duration channel threshold so we know if a job (for example, replication jobs) is running for more than 2-3 hours there is likely an issue. Or, the last job run is set to alert us if there was no run within the needed period. For our NOC team we have also enabled autoacknowledge so the backup team does get alerted for backup issues but after 1-2 minutes the alerts are acknowledged automatically in PRTG so they don’t interfere with Systems monitoring.

 

Interesting! Its been a long time since I test PRTG.

IT Lover | Veeam Vanguard | VUG Leader | Blogger

Comment


Terms & Conditions