Veeam ONE, a part of Veeam Data Platform Advanced and Premium editions, monitors your virtual and data protection environment and alerts you of issues occurring in the data center. Veeam ONE contains around 300 alarms that allow you to monitor events happening in your environment, but even with its out-of-the-box features, you may decide you want to build your own alarms for specific use cases. To do this, first, you will need to decide what ‘type’ of alarm you want to create. Multiple options are available when creating an alarm, it can be based on a backup infrastructure component such as backup servers, backup repositories, backup proxy, or a different component. You also have the added capability of basing the alarm on an object in your virtual environment.
When creating an alarm, you should know what you want the alarm to monitor. This can be based on a task or event, performance, or even in-guest processes or service. To create an alarm, navigate to the Alarm Management view in the Veeam ONE client and then select the infrastructure component you want to base the alarm on. In the actions pane, you then will select ‘New’.
Alarms are configured to be event-based or for a specific condition or state. Event based rules are for alerting about specific events that occur. These events can be based on Veeam Backup & Replication Alarms, Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 Alarms, and virtual infrastructure events. Be sure to check the proper documentation to ensure you have the correct name for the event.
The other option is to create an alarm rule based on a specific condition or state. When you select this option, you can see there are some pre-defined conditions provided. The conditions available will depend on the infrastructure object you base the alarm on. For example, if you want to create an alarm based on your backup repositories, you can base the condition on power or connection state changes, SOBR data transfer state, and so on. These options can be seen on the screen below.
These conditions will change based on the object you create the alarm for.
One of the types of alarms you can create can be based on an in-guest process or service. By selecting the machine, and flipping to the Guest OS tab, you can login to the OS and see all the processes and services running on that machine, from here you can create an alarm based on a processes/services certain condition or state. One of the alarms I learned how to create a couple years ago was done exactly like this.
For this alarm, I was able to use my credentials login to the machine, then create an alarm based on the state of a process or service.
In this example, I wanted to ensure I was alerted if the DNS service was not running. The DNS service is a critical component in most environments, as it plays a role in connecting users to websites, services and resources across the internet. If this service is not running, due to any unforeseen circumstance, this could cause a lot of issues across the organization.
By creating an alarm based on this, I will be notified in real-time, if this service is not running for any reason. This will allow me to investigate further and troubleshoot as fast as possible to limit business disruption. After creating this alarm, I want to ensure I set up the proper notification settings.
Notifications are sent when the alarm is triggered based on the rules configured. For this example, I can configure a ServiceNow incident to be created, this integration allows for these alarms to appear in your organizations ServiceNow instance and then be directed to the proper administrator. When configuring the Server Settings for ServiceNow you can set the severity of the alarm, based on the impact and urgency if its high, medium or low.
There are other notification options available, whichever you choose, allows you to receive the alarm details and other information pertaining to the alarm, so you can resolve the issue as soon as possible.
Once you define the rule type, you need to make sure you assign it to part of your infrastructure. Since I went ahead and created this alarm based on a service running on a specific machine, it is already assigned.
In certain cases, this may not be applicable, you may want to create a general alarm and assign it to multiple parts of your environment. The “Assignment” tab means what machines or groups you want this alarm to monitor. I say groups because you have the option to assign alarms to business view groups. This can be helpful when it comes to minimizing alarm noise, so that you receive the most critical alerts for the most critical machines. This can also come in handy when you have different teams within your organization who only need to be alerted when certain conditions happen.
Lastly, you can provide more information through the knowledge base tab, giving the alarm a description, possible causes and point to additional resources that can help troubleshoot the error.
A Deeper Look into Alarms
Veeam ONE comes with a set of predefined alarms that cover most common monitoring scenarios. By configuring alarms the right way, you can ensure the environment is running effectively and receive the proper notifications to fix and monitor data center concerns. The predefined alarms are based on common issues, with standard performance benchmarks that fit most organizations. By utilizing the ability to create alarms, you extend these capabilities even further to ensure data protection, compliance, user behavior and steady business operations. Throughout this blog post, I described how you can create alarms in different ways to maximize your Veeam ONE deployment. By understanding the different configuration options, you can eliminate alert fatigue, maximize efficiency and ensure compliance.
If you want to see how to work with alarms in a demo, be sure to check out this YouTube video.
For other configuration options, check out this blog post: Mastering Veeam ONE Alarms: Configuring Alarms for Effective Management | Veeam Community Resource Hub
