Time for Community Innovation with Veeam APIs

For some time now, I have been thinking about how to centralize and manage all my critical applications and data backup using one secure web interface. As an Ex-Veeam employee who is still passionate about the Veeam technology, I decided to build my first community web portal – Sonaros.io

For the last six months I have been working on a new web portal called Sonaros.io. Sonaros.io is a portal that helps customers easily monitor their data management (backups) from one secured centralized web interface across on-premises, cloud and Microsoft Office 365 (SaaS). Today, I am pleased to announce to the community the first beta version of Sonaros.io.

Before I introduce the Sonaros.io platform, I must clarify why I decided to develop this portal in Veeam when I am no longer a Veeam employee. On moving to the other side of product utilization, I found many gaps with Veeam products when it comes to licensing management; i.e., reporting. To close some of those gaps, I decided to help the community by developing a simpler three-tier platform:

EndUser:

• Visibility of the backup status
• Jobs basic management
• Invoicing/costing
• Web interface access (Portable device friendly)

Service Provider:

• Tenant management (Baas/DRaaS)
• Tenant access and reporting 
• Automated invoicing
• Points calculation and automated reporting

Veeam Distributor:

• Manage SP’s/Enduser licencing
• Automated point counts collection from SP;s
• Automated invoicing

Those items above give you a quick peek of the why; now, let’s focus on the how.

Sonaros.io 

As I mentioned above, Sonaros.io is a web-based portal hosted in Azure WebApps. The code was written on Angolar and .Net. The platform is using the Veeam Restful APIs of EM, VBR, VBA-Azure, VBA-AWS, VBO and vCentre; though only EM and vCenter are ready on Beta v0.1. To sign-up, you can head over to sonaros.io and hit the Register link:

The registration process is very simple and requires responses to five items, not counting the password:

After you have registered, a welcome email is sent to you; now you are ready to log in.

Login and Veeam Infrastructure

On your first login, you are guided to the infrastructure to add your Veeam backup environment. To add your Veeam backup environment, you must expose the Veeam Enterprise Manager from behind a NAT. If you require more information about your Backed up VMs, you can also add and connect your vCentre. If you add your vCentre, Sonaros.io retrieves the total size of all the source VMs per job. This can be good for source charges invoicing:

Note: There are more Veeam products in the drop-down list. At this beta v0.1, only Veeam enterprise manager and vCenter are supported and functioning. Also, note that multi Enterprise and vCenter servers are supported.

On-Prem Backup

I’m sure you have already guessed; On-Prem backup refers to Veeam backup and replication, i.e., EM. After your EM has been added to the Infrastructure, you can:

• Monitor your backup jobs  
• Monitor success/warning and error jobs
• Number of backed-up: VM’s, Physical (Win/Linux) and replication
• Average Deduplication and compression
• Cost of the backup (based on source or target data)
• Last seven days of the backup repository consumption

In this beta version, the info is presented as a status only; but in the coming version, I will allow Start/Stop and pause jobs with more backup status, average success rate, and more.

Dashboard

The Dashboard is intended to be a quick review of your backup status across all the Veeam products; (this will be included in a future release), the consumption of the points/licencing; again, across all the Veeam products. In addition, you can quickly check the consumption of your backup repository and make sure you are not running out of space.

Note: Notification, showing the time/date of login, logout, configuration changes etc…

Setting

From your profile, you can change some settings, such as:

• Change your password
• Enable/Disable Multi-factor Authentication (MS Authenticator App is required)
• Enable Deduplication/Compression average on the backup screen
• Charge per source/destination data size

On this beta version, I have hidden the invoicing section; the development of this feature takes more time than I have available just now. It will be included in the next version.

I have big plans for the Sonaros.io platform; it will help many customers with their daily backup monitoring across all the platforms. My plan is to add more backup products in the future; but, as an advocate for Veeam APIs , I have started with Veeam products. This may also keep me close to the Veeam technology. This beta version is released to the community to help me get your feedback; then I can focus on the features that are the most important to you.