Transcript
Today's video is about licensing, reporting, and VCSP pulse integration in Beam Service Protoconsole. But first, we're going to look into licensing the Service Protoconsole itself. What are the difference? License key is supported. Then in the demo environment, we'll discover VCSP pulse integration. Then we'll look into how to manage license keys for the products in the Service Protoconsole. And we'll wrap up with usage reporting best practices. When you install the console, it asks you to provide the license key. Technically, you can use any rental key, but the recommended approach is as follows. If the Service Protoconsole is used to centrally manage agents directly, for example, Windows or Linux servers and workstations, then a dedicated Veeam Agent rental license should be created in Pulse. These workloads are consumed centrally by the console and shared across managed customers. In the Pulse, it is currently located under other Veeam products and is called Veeam Agent. Then you can specify how many instances you need to protect, but remember, you can adjust it any time later if needed. For every other use case, including standard monitoring and management scenarios, the free Veeam Service Protoconsole license is sufficient. It is pre-created in your Pulse account, and you can use it to install both the console and Cloud Connect if needed. Now let's have a look at all the licensing functionality in the demo. So in order to access the Pulse portal plugin, you navigate to the plugin library, catalog, and this is where you can find the VCSP Pulse title. Here in the main window, the first thing you need to do is to configure connection to the Pulse portal. So you click on the configure button and it asks you to authenticate on the ProPartner portal in order to generate the connection token. I have it opened over here. Here on the ProPartner, you click generate, grab the token, then insert it into the connection window, click connect, and then you are done. Then we have these two toggles. So the first one is company management. This is what allows Service Protoconsole to send and retrieve data from Pulse. Without that toggle, you cannot really do much. So you need to enable it in order to retrieve data and associate license keys with the customers. And the second one is what actually allows you to create and download license keys directly in the plugin window. So having enabled required integration options, we can proceed to the next window, just companies. And this is where you configure the mapping between the Pulse and Service Protoconsole companies. So you can see in this view, I have the list of Pulse companies and the Service Protoconsole companies. And the difference between them is that the Pulse company is the entity that exists in Pulse, and you associate any new license key with the Pulse entity. If you're an experienced Pulse user, you may have noticed anytime you create a license key, you have an option to associate it with the end customer or with your own company. On the other hand, the Service Protoconsole company is something that only exists in the Service Protoconsole. And this is your customers that you provide your managed backup services to. So you associate the VSPC company with the backup servers and backup agents that your customers use. Now how do you actually do the mapping between these two entities depends whether the entity exists in Pulse or in Service Protoconsole company, or if it's a new customer at all. So for every new customer or any new company, the plugin will create the corresponding entity automatically, but for all the existing customers, what you can do is you can go to mapping and map them manually. You can use auto mapping based on the company name, or if the corresponding entity is missing, you can have Service Protoconsole create that entity either in the console or in the Pulse. So this mapping is essential for license key management and to also streamline reporting. So in the usage reporting, you will see that a certain amount of points was contributed to a particular company based on this mapping. Now the Service Protoconsole also has extensive reseller functionality. And for this reason, we have the reseller options in the Pulse plugin too. So here you have pretty much the same options with mapping, you can map the reseller that exists in your Service Protoconsole to the Pulse entity, and further down the road, you can also associate license keys with a particular reseller. Now let's move to the biggest part, which is license keys management. In this view, you have all the licenses that are currently created in Pulse. So let's go ahead and create a new key. In this view, what first thing you need to do is to select the corresponding product. Let's focus on Team Data Platform for this demo. And you notice that I have automated reporting on. If you're not on the automated reporting program, you will have this toggle grayed out. But if you are enabled for automated reporting, you can optionally disable it if you are installing the license in the dark side environment where you will do manual reporting. But for all online VBR instances and other V products, we do recommend having it on so that the license usage is populated automatically. On the next screen, you need to specify how many and what type of workloads you want to protect. Let's say for this customer, I want 10 VMs and a few file shares. So the sum of all the workloads will create a total number of points that will be associated with the license. And let's click Finish. And let's filter for unassigned license key to find it easier. Yeah, so this is the license key that we've just created. As you can see, at the moment, it's not assigned or associated with any of the end customers I have. So first step that you need to do is to assign it to the customer. Now, if this is the service that you provide for your end user, they have a dedicated VBR server, V1 server, or even VB65, you do associate the license with the end customer. So I'm going to choose this one. There are some other use cases, specifically when you run hosted environments and provide multi-tenancy services, be it Cloud Connect, VB35, for example, or even if you're on V1 in your hosted environment, in this case, you don't associate the license with a particular end user. Instead, you can associate it with your own company. So by default, it's called my company, and then use it in your shared environment. So in a few moments, the license should be associated with a company. Before we proceed with the license that we just created, I wanted to show you another functionality. So let's say you have a customer that is running out of available points, and you need to add more points to their existing license. So instead of creating a new license key and pushing it out to the customer, what you can do is you can very conveniently edit the existing key, add some more workloads, click finish. That will update the license in Pulse, and if customer's VBR server in this instance is online and they have automated license update enabled, it will push the updated license into their server, which is very convenient. Now we have the license that we've just created for this customer, Pericorp, and further down the road, we have some actions. So what you can do is obviously you can assign it to any other customer or revoke the key, but you can also download it if you want to, let's say, send it to customer via email, or if you operate in the customer mode already and you want to install it manually. But the Service Product Console also allows you to push that license key automatically to the managed instance. In order to do that, you need to access a different menu. So let's go back to the main menu or main view in the Service Product Console, and you can navigate to license information, and this is where you can see different license keys grouped by managed products. So if I have a customer with Veeam Background Replication, and this is their VBR server, I can go ahead and install the key directly from VCSP Pulse. So I can choose the new key that we just created with Veeam Data Platform Premium, choose this one, click install, and that will push the key to the managed VBR server. Remember we discussed in the beginning that there is a particular use case where you don't need to create license keys and associate them with end users, and this is Veeam Agent. So if we navigate to Veeam Agent tab, you can see that I don't have an option to push a license key. Instead, I can revoke a license key, and that will switch the managed instance into community mode again. But all these licenses are actually consumed from my Service Product Console license, which you can access by navigating to the overview tab and clicking on the license status. So this is my Veeam Agent license that are created in Pulse for Veeam Agent product and installed in the Service Product Console, and this license is automatically distributed to all managed agents. For other use cases, be it Cloud Connect, Veeam One, or VB365, typically if they're in the hosted environment, you also don't associate them with the end user. So you see that I don't have any association with the end customer over here, but still I have the option to install an updated license key from Pulse. The same functionality is available for Cloud Connect, Veeam One, and VB365 altogether, including Veeam Backup and Replication. If you run a Veeam Backup and Replication in the hosted scenario, for example, you're providing self-services with Cloud Connect, then you don't really associate a VBR license with the customer. Instead, it is assigned to your company, as you can see in this example. Now let's have a look at how usage reporting is done. We can navigate to the Usage Reports tab, and here we have a list of all monthly usages. So you can click on one and have it downloaded, have it opened over here. So what you can see here is the total number of points you consumed across all your customers and across your all managed instances. You can also have overview by companies and by license IDs. One thing that I wanted to point out here is there might be a situation when one of the instances is not online when the license usage collection happens. In this case, you will see typically a error message here in the yellow box saying that the last collection failed. In this case, it is recommended to check for manual reporting on that instance and figure out why the connection didn't work properly. There are also other scenarios how you can streamline the reporting. Namely, we do recommend enabling automatic report approval. So what it does is on the first of each month on any managed instance, for example, on the VBR, the customer may have a pop-up saying, please review the license usage. And if you don't have this toggle enabled, this will delay license data collection up until the sixth of the month. If you have this toggle enabled, you will have your license usage report collected on the first. Now if you're on the outer reporting, you don't need to grab the monthly usage report here from the console manually, although the data will be collected, but it is automatically propagated to Pulse. So on the automated usage reporting, you will just typically go to Pulse and approve your license usage report. That's it for today. Thank you for watching and check out other how-to videos.
