The Blog of Jorge de la Cruz

Everything about VMware, Veeam, InfluxData, Grafana, Zimbra, etc.

Looking for the Perfect Dashboard: InfluxDB, Telegraf, and Grafana – Part XLIV (Monitoring Veeam Backup & Replication API)

- Written in: veeam

Greetings, friends! The excitement in the data protection community has been brewing, and for a very good reason. After being inundated with inquiries, it’s finally time to lift the veil on the next big thing in the Grafana blog series – a freshly minted Grafana Dashboard for Veeam Backup & Replication, now leveraging the power of the novel VBR API.

For those familiar with the data protection scene, you might recall that we’ve already got a Grafana Dashboard dedicated to the Veeam Enterprise Manager API since 2020. A vanguard of its time, the pioneering tool offered impressive capabilities and has seen its fair share of success with more than 1000 downloads.

However, this cutting-edge dashboard catapults us into a new era. Breaking away from the reliance on Enterprise Manager, this new dashboard gets down to brass tacks, focusing solely on the Veeam Backup & Replication REST API. Not only does this ensure seamless interplay with various Veeam Servers, but it also paves the way for a larger community engagement, propelling us into an innovative frontier of data protection visibility using OSE tools like Grafana.

With this new dashboard at your fingertips, I am eagerly looking forward to fostering a vibrant community around it. I am inviting all of you to start utilizing this state-of-the-art tool, bring forth your feedback, and spark discussions in the comments, or GitHub, for enhancements and improvements.

Grafana Dashboard for Veeam Backup & Replication API

When you finish the entry you will have something similar to this. It might be different according to your environment, number of days you select, protected workloads, jobs, etc.

Dashboard – Summary

  • Job Historical Information – The very first graph. The most important one in my opinion. Grouped by 24 hours, get to know the status of your policies per day, on a range in time.
  • Job Historical Information Table – Very similar to the previous panel, but this time with more details about job name, status, date, etc.
  • Job Historical Information Duration – Very similar to previous panels, but this time showing in a bubble way, how much every job has taken to execute. A very cool way to see what jobs are taking the longer, trends, etc.
  • Job Last Result – BIG COLORED PANELS, what everyone I talk about is asking for. Get to know the last status across all jobs, and focus only on the ones are yellow/red.
  • Infrastructure – A few tables that shows some Infrastructure data across the Veeam Backup & Replication. A lot to improve here, but so far the VBR API doesn’t give us much more details.
  • Restore Points – More big panels in colors. The more points, the darker the green becomes. This is a list of all your workloads, or the selected workload on top, with the amount of restore points to date.

Topology with all logical components

This entry is very similar to the previous ones, we will use a bash shell script that connects to our Veeam Backup & Replication Servers, using the REST API, and then will send the metrics to InfluxDB, and visualize them with Grafana . The design would be something similar to this:

Download and configure the veeam_backup_and_replication.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:

You will need jq, so please go ahead and install it first (apt-get install jq, or yum install jq)

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

##
# Configurations
##
# Endpoint URL for InfluxDB
veeamInfluxDBURL="http://YOURINFLUXSERVERIP" #Your InfluxDB Server, http://FQDN or https://FQDN if using SSL
veeamInfluxDBPort="8086" #Default Port
veeamInfluxDBBucket="veeam" # InfluxDB bucket name (not ID)
veeamInfluxDBToken="TOKEN" # InfluxDB access token with read/write privileges for the bucket
veeamInfluxDBOrg="ORG NAME" # InfluxDB organisation name (not ID)

# Endpoint URL for login action
veeamJobSessions="1000"
veeamUsername="YOURVBRUSER"
veeamPassword="YOURVBRPASSWORD"
veeamBackupServer="YOURVBRAPIPORT"
veeamBackupPort="9419" #Default Port

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

chmod +x veeam_backup_and_replication.sh

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

Writing veeam_vbr_info to InfluxDB
Writing veeam_vbr_sessions to InfluxDB
Writing veeam_vbr_sessions to InfluxDB
Writing veeam_vbr_sessions to InfluxDB
Writing veeam_vbr_sessions to InfluxDB
Writing veeam_vbr_sessions to InfluxDB

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

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

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 Servers, Workloads, Jobs, etc.:

Import Grafana Dashboards easily

So that you don’t have to waste hours configuring a new Dashboard, and ingesting and debugging what 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: 18854, 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.

I hope you like it, and I would like to leave you the complete series here, so you can start playing with the plugins that I have been telling you about all these years:

Reader Interactions

Comments

  4. Leandro Torres says

    Hola Jorge, muchas gracias por tus aportes.
    Estoy teniendo el mismo error reportado por CNone, el entorno de Grafana, Influx, Telegraf, está en K8s. Apliqué la solución aplicada por el post pero sigue idem. Me recomendarías instalar el entorno en un Linux u alguna otra recomendación? Gracias de nuevo.

  7. Shw says

    I received this erros… Veeam 11 Enterprise Plus with Influx DB 2.x

    jq: error (at :1): Cannot iterate over null (null)
    jq: error (at :1): Cannot iterate over null (null)
    jq: error (at :1): Cannot iterate over null (null)
    jq: error (at :1): Cannot iterate over null (null)
    jq: error (at :1): Cannot iterate over null (null)

  9. Juanjo Cruz says

    Hola Jorge,
    He descargado el script en una VM Linux. Decir que en esa VM no tengo InfluxDB instalado, tengo el cli de Influx.

    Cuando trato de lanzar el script, veo que no me está cogiendo la URL.

    Error: failed to write data: Post “http://localhost:8086/api/v2/write?bucket=veeam&org=test&precision=s”: dial tcp [::1]:8086: connect: connection refused

    Por probar, he añadido el parámetro –host cada vez que haces un influx write pero también me da error.

    Writing veeam_vbr_info to InfluxDB
    Error: failed to write data: 400 Bad Request: failed to parse line protocol: errors encountered on line(s):
    error parsing line 1 (1-based): Tag Set Malformed

    ¿Se te ocurre qué puede ser?

    Gracias

  11. jorgeuk says

    Hola, parece que el script intenta escribir en localhost, donde no tienes InfluxDB, que tiene tu config al principio, sin passwords?

  13. MaroonK says

    Hi Jorge,
    First of all thank you very much.

    I am trying to setup grafana dashboard for veeam.

    I have veeam b&r version 12.

    I install grafana v10.4.2.0 on windows server.
    I install influxdb v2.7.6 on same windows server

    I am running a Ubuntu desktop vm v24.04.

    I am trying to run the sh script from this vm but I it’s not working. I m getting an error message,

    ./veeam.sh: line 43: curl: command not found
    ./veeam.sh: line 45: Responce.json: No Such file or directory
    rm: cannot remove ‘respince.json’: No Such file or directory
    An unexpected error occurred with HTTP status code:.

    Thanks.

  14. Michele says

    Hi!
    I get this error:

    root@veeamdashboard:~# ./veeam_backup_and_replication.sh
    ./veeam_backup_and_replication.sh: line 45: response.json: No such file or directory
    rm: cannot remove ‘response.json’: No such file or directory
    An unexpected error occurred with HTTP status code: 000.

    Any idea on how to find the problem?

  15. jorgeuk says

    Are you running the script from some folder that requires special permissions? Try to save the script to the user folder, non root, some /home/user, etc.

    Thank you

  16. mustafa says

    Hello

    great work

    every think is okay regarding api but can written in influx db and hsow to me this error

  18. Michele says

    Hi!
    I finally moved to the latest Veeam v12 but i cannot get any data into these:

    – “Job last result” (can’t see the Veeam version before the “Last Job result” as your screenshot shows
    – “Restore Points”

    I get an error with small triangle with the tooltip that reads something like “….invalid token for primary expression…”

    Any ideas?

  19. Michele Costantino says

    Using Veeam version 12.2.0.334 I don’t get any Job Last result and any Restore Points.
    I get no data on those two panels but i get a small triangle with a tooltip that read
    “invalid: compilation failed: error @5:8-9:1 expected RPAREN, got EOF…..”

    Any idea?

  20. Juanjo says

    Hola Jorge,
    Lo primero, gracias por el trabajo que haces.

    Mira, no sé porqué pero no hay manera de que mi dashboard luzca como el tuyo.

    En Job Last Result me aparece esto -> “invalid: compilation failed: error @5:6-9:25: expected RPAREN, got EOF error @6:3-6:5: invalid expression: invalid token for primary expression: PIPE_FORWARD”

    En Backup Repository – Usage Capacity -> NO DATA
    En Restore Points -> N/A

    No he cambiado ninguna query, tal cual lo tienes tú, lo importé. ¿Qué puede ser?

  21. Michele says

    Seems broken on 12.2.0.334

    Not getting the version of Veeam (usually displayed near some labels), nothing on job last result and nothing on restore points

  22. ahmet says

    hello
    thanks for dahsboard its good work!

    i cant get restore points and job last results
    it says invalid: compilation failed: error @5:6-9:25: expected RPAREN, got EOF error @6:3-6:5: invalid expression: invalid token for primary expression: PIPE_FORWARD

    may you say me solution 🙂

    regards

  28. Michele says

    Yes, latest, downloaded some days ago.
    I’m investigating….but it’s very hard for me!
    If you’ve some ideas or suggestions, please let me know

    Michele

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.