Looking for the Perfect Dashboard: InfluxDB, Telegraf and Grafana – Part XXIV (Monitoring Veeam Backup for Microsoft Azure)

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Greetings friends, I bring you a new entry about Grafana and Veeam, which I’m sure you’ll like and put in your labs. Veeam has recently announced Veeam Backup for Microsoft Azure. Along the ton of functionalities that the product includes, one is a public RESTFul API, and I thought it could be a good idea to create a Dashboard for this solution.

Today, I am pleased to bring you a complete and finished Dashboard to monitor Veeam Backup for Microsoft Azure, without limit of VMs, jobs, or Repos.

You will see that there is a Map inside the Dashboard, and that’s because I consider quite important to be able to look globally and see what regions have unprotected VMs.

Veeam Backup for Microsoft Azure Dashboard

When you finish the entry you will have something similar to this Dashboard:

Dashboard – Summary

  • Summary – Total number of Repos, Policies, Protected VMs, and VBA and Worker version
  • Unprotected VMs – Both, in a useful list with size, region, and name. And with a really great visual Map to see the unprotected Azure Regions
  • Job Historical Information – A simple table with the last jobs and the status, it also includes if it is a Snapshot Job or Backup Job
  • Job Duration – A simple graph that shows the duration per job across time
  • Protected vs. Unprotected VMs

Topology with all logical components

This entry is a little different from the previous ones since in this case, we will use a shell script to collect the Veeam Backup for Microsoft Azure metrics using RESTful API. The design would be something similar to this: As we can see, the shell script will download metrics from Veeam Backup for Microsoft Azure using RESTful API, which will send to InfluxDB as well, from where we can comfortably view them with Grafana.

Download and configure the veeam_azure.sh script

We have almost everything ready, we have one last step, the script that will make all this work, we will download the latest version from the Github repository:

This shell script can be downloaded and run from the telegraf server, or influxDB, or any other Linux. We will have to edit the configuration parameters:

# Endpoint URL for InfluxDB
veeamInfluxDBURL="YOURINFLUXSERVER" ##Use https://fqdn or https://IP in case you use SSL
veeamInfluxDBPort="8086" #Default Port
veeamInfluxDB="YOURINFLUXDB" #Default Database
veeamInfluxDBUser="YOURINFLUXUSER" #User for Database
veeamInfluxDBPassword="YOURINFLUXPASS" #Password for Database

# Endpoint URL for login action
veeamUsername="YOURVEEAMBACKUPUSER"
veeamPassword="YOURVEEAMBACKUPPASS"
veeamBackupAzureServer="https://YOURVEEAMBACKUPIP"
veeamBackupAzurePort="443" #Default Port

Once the changes are done, make the script executable with chmod:

chmod +x veeam_azure.sh

The output of the command should be something like the next, without errors:

HTTP/1.1 204 No Content
Content-Type: application/json
Request-Id: 42df97bc-8ac8-11ea-8168-0050569002da
X-Influxdb-Build: OSS
X-Influxdb-Version: 1.7.10
X-Request-Id: 42df97bc-8ac8-11ea-8168-0050569002da
Date: Thu, 30 Apr 2020 09:52:10 GMT

If so, please now add this script to your crontab, like for example every 30 minutes:

*/30 * * * * /home/oper/veeam_azure.sh >> /var/log/veeamazure.log 2>&1

We are ready to move to the next step.

Grafana Dashboards

I created a Dashboard from scratch by selecting the best requests to the database, finishing off colors, thinking about graphics, and how to display them, and everything is automated so that it fits our environment without any problem and without having to edit anything manually. The Dashboard can be found here, once imported, you can use the top drop-down menus to select between organizations, backups, repositories and proxies, VMs, etc.:

Import Grafana Dashboards easily

So that you don’t have to waste hours configuring a new Dashboard, and ingesting and debugging you want, I have already a wonderful Dashboard with everything you need to monitor our environment in a very simple way, you will be like the image I showed you above. Select the name you want and enter the ID: 12204, which is the unique ID of the Dashboard, or the URL:

With the menus above you can display and adjust the Dashboard to your different choices:

Please leave your feedback in the comments, or on GitHub.

That’s all folks, if you want to follow the full Blog series about Grafana, InfluxDB, Telegraf, please click on the next links:

Author: jorgeuk

Father, writing in https://www.jorgedelacruz.es and https://jorgedelacruz.uk Blogger, Systems Engineer @veeam - vExpert 2014/2020 & NTC 2018/19

2 Thoughts

  1. Jus a couple of improvements:
    Correct UOM, energy in wh, power in watts.
    If both vertical axes at used show the legend.

  2. Hello Jose,
    This dashboard is for Grafana not for the energy one, have you seen the last dashboard, what is wrong with the last one?

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