VSCP and Usage Reporting

Monitoring can be done through regular compliance audits. Veeam provides resources within the Veeam Service Provider Console (VSPC) to monitor the status of agents, including whether they are connected or disconnected. You can set up notifications to alert you if an agent has been disconnected for an extended period. 

Veeam does not have a native feature to automatically disable a license if the agent loses connectivity. However, you can condition the continuity of services or license validity on the installation and maintenance of the agent through a company policy. This can be specified in contracts with clients, stating that agent installation is a condition for license usage. Veeam recommends proactive monitoring to ensure the process runs smoothly.

​@matheusgiovanini , Let's say a customer used a license on multiple servers, and doesn't tell us about one or two of them? They don't install the management agent, and we have no idea it exists. When we run usage reports and send them to Veeam, those would be missing would they not? How does Veeam account for this? 

One potential solution would be to establish an internal policy that requires the installation of the agent and to regularly follow up to ensure it’s active. To make this process easier, I might be able to automate the installation of the agent using GPO, which would ensure that the agent is automatically installed on the customer’s servers.

Here are some guidelines on how to generate reports and manage licensing effectively:

• Individual Reporting: If the VSPC is not used to manage the backup infrastructure, it’s essential to collect and submit license usage data separately from each backup server. This can be done by generating individual reports directly from each Veeam Backup & Replication console and submitting them to Veeam.

• Centralized Management: When managing multiple servers, using centralized license management tools like Veeam Enterprise Manager is recommended. This approach helps monitor and control license usage across all servers, ensuring compliance and accurate reporting.

All of those options are only things that the customer can do. We don’t control their Veeam servers at all. We’re just a service provider and not an MSP, so we can’t modify their GPOs, log into individual Veeam backup servers or Enterprise Manager servers

It sounds like we just need to ask them to install the agent and say “pretty please”. I think with that way, there are definitely going to be workloads that slip through the cracks, and we’re definitely going to report incorrectly.

This is what I was leaning towards as well. We don’t have anything in our contracts with the customers requiring them to install the agent, and some previous attempts to ask them politely have often failed as they refuse. It sounds like that has to get into the contract retroactively and moving forward for the sake of licensing.

​@Mohamed Ali . What would you do for cases where a customer is purchasing rental licenses through us, then applying them to their multiple customers underneath them? Reseller function in VSPC? Give them a login to VSPC and ask them to create a company and download the agent from there?

​@Tommy O'Shea  That’s correct. We call them partners, and we create a reseller account for them in the VSPC portal so they can create multiple tenant accounts under their reseller account and they can download the management agent from there. We still have visibility into all tenant VBR servers and agents, including those created by the resellers. This allows us to install the license via the VSPC portal without needing to provide them license file.

​@Mohamed Ali Thank you. One more question. Have you enabled Automatic License Reporting? It appears this would keep the licenses generated always at 2.5 months out, renewing every month. 
I’m wondering if this would be a way to ensure that people keep their agents online and connected, or else they’d be at risk of the license expiring.

​@Tommy O'Shea No, I haven’t tried automatic license reporting yet, but it looks like a good option for managing customer license provisioning and it doesn’t required management agent to be connected online always unless we want to manage their VBR server from VSPC portal. If the customer's VBR doesn’t report to the VSPC Pulse portal (ALK Update), the license will automatically expire in the next renewal cycle which is 2.5 months. 

​@Mohamed Ali I just realized another limitation. Where customers are using Veeam Enterprise manager, VSPC is unable to push the license file to it, and requires a .lic file. 

What do you do about these customers?

I don’t think so we can push the license to Enterprise manager using the VSPC console and it’s not currently supported it seems. https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/vac/provider_admin/install_license.html?ver=81

If the customer VBR server managed by Enterprise manager, it’s recommended to deploy the license via Enterprise manager console. 

​@Mohamed Ali So you don’t have any customers that are using Enterprise Manager? Or can you confirm you just give them the .lic file to install manually?

​@Tommy O'Shea We don’t have any customer using Enterprise Manager that is managed by VSPC. I almost sure that we cannot deploy license to Enterprise Manage using VSPC portal however I will validate and confirm in my lab. 

No need to test unless you really want to. I can confirm it does not push a license to Enterprise Manager servers.