If you are a Service Provider or you are running Veeam for large organisations, you might want to allow your customers to view and monitor only their backup and replication jobs and not be able to scan other customers activity. If that is the case, you are already aware of the Veeam VBR challenge.
Let’s learn how https://sonaros.io easily grants your customers secure access to allow them to view their jobs, costs, and storage consumption.
Flashback
Several months ago, I wrote a blog post introducing Sonaros.io, To continue on from that blog post, this blog post provides more information about the progress made on the development of Sonaros.io, and its new features.
The New Innovation
After almost five months, I’m pleased to release the new version of the Sonaros.io platform. You can now register your Veeam Backup infrastructure; and having done that, you can now simply grant access to each customer to enable them to view their own Backup and Replication jobs.
To begin, complete the required details in the Register Account entry box, shown below:
On completing the registration, you can add your Veeam Enterprise Manager and VMware Infrastructure to get started with muti-tenant customer access.
Please note: In this release, you can add only Veeam Enterprise Manager and VMware vCenter. The vCentre access is an option used to get the source VM size; the good news is that this option will be discontinued when Veeam releases v12. In v12, I expect the VM size will be retrievable using the Veeam API.
Create a Tenant
To begin granting access to each of your customers, you must create a tenant. To do this, simply browse to Tenant from the left-hand menu and click on Add Tenant; then fill in the tenant details as illustrated in the screenshot below:
After the tenant has been registered, your tenant automatically receives a welcome email with his username and temporary password:
As a Service Provider, or the large organisation Admin, you are required to setup several basic parameters under “Tenant Setting”. These basic parameters help your customer get started. These settings are:
- Job Prefix: The prefix used to segregate each customer job
- Cost of VM and Points: Cost of VM backup (VMWare and HyperV), plus point consumption for each VM
- Cost of Agent and Points: Cost of Veeam backup agent (Windows/Linux), plus point consumption for each agent
- Cost of VM Replication and Points: Cost of Veeam Replication (VMware/HyperV), plus point consumption for each VM
- Charges: Charge per source size, target size or both
- Storage cost per/GB
- Show: allow the customer to see the average deduplication and compression
The figure below illustrates the basic parameter data fields to be completed:
There are two other tabs; the Status tab and the Invoice tab.
- Status tab: As a Service Provider, or large organisation Admin, you can see the cost, storage size trend, and point consumption for each customer.
- Invoice tab: This tab is under construction on this release.
Tenant Access
Upon receiving the welcome email, the tenant can use the login button to go to the browser login page. To use the new access, the tenant enters their username (email) and the temporary password. After the tenant has logged in for the first time, they are required to change the temporary password; also, if they so chose they can enable the MFA.
Tenant Dashboard
The dashboard allows the tenant to quickly and easily view all the backup and replication jobs under their account. Additionally. the tenant can see the up-to-date cost of the solution, and is provided with much more information. See an example of the dashboard in the following screenshot:
Backup
On the Backup option, your customer/tenant can see all their backup and replication jobs for the last month. In includes in depth information about each job, such as:
- the date of the job run
- time of job start and stop
- job run duration
- backup type; i.e full or incremental
- average compression and deduplication
In the following screenshot you can also see that the tenant can start, retry and stop the backup job.
Invoices
Invoices is still under construction in this version, but the idea is clear; automatic invoicing is provided for each tenant/customer with a detailed view of each charge.
It is important to note that the platform exposes an API to integrate the Sonaros.io invoicing with any other invoicing system that your company may have.
Conclusion
Sonaros.io is a comprehensive data management platform targeting Veeam software products. In the future, this platform will centralise and provide a multi-tenant capability to all Veeam products with one access to assist Service Providers and admins of large organisations to keep their tenants informed and in control of their backup budgets. In addition, it will provide an easier way to report consumption points between partners and Service Providers.
This version 1 of Sonaros.io platform is released as a community edition; I will keep adding features and improvements on a regular basis. I hope you find this platform useful. Please provide any feedback you may have; that way I can enhance it and keep adding useful features.
