Understanding and solving service provider pain points
For all service providers, the ability to manage users, have visibility into their operations and report on key data for reporting and billing purposes have always been traditional sources of pain. Anyone working for a cloud or managed service provider understands that the ability to have end-to-end visibility for the services that they offer is a core component of delivering on these services.
Software exists to make our lives easier: to help solve specific issues, problems or pain points, and to automate complex and tedious manual operations. At its essence, that is why Veeam created what was originally known as the Managed Backup Portal, and is now known as Veeam Availability Console. Now in its fourth release, the focus of this product revolves around the notion of making life easier for our Veeam Cloud & Service Provider partners.
Because of this, and the renewed focus on it as a pure service provider offering, Veeam Availability Console is no more!
Introducing Veeam Service Provider Console v4
With the release of v4, we have renamed Veeam Availability Console to Veeam Service Provider Console (VSPC). As mentioned above, this name change reflects the commitment to this product being focused on delivering on the needs of service providers offering their clients and tenants services based on technologies driven by the Veeam platform. In addition, v4 builds on the previous releases and firmly places it as a critical component of any Veeam-based, service-provider offering.
Key new features and enhancements:
- Usage reporting 2.0
- ConnectWise Automate Plugin
- New platform support
- New RESTful APIs (Preview)
Let’s look at these in more detail.
Usage reporting 2.0
Veeam Service Provider Console v4 offers an enhanced usage reporting engine that makes reporting monthly usage simple, accurate and reliable for our ecosystem of over 24,000 VCSP partners. Veeam Service Provider Console also enables VCSP partners to deploy, support and manage the new portable Veeam Universal Licensing.
New license-usage management and a usage-reporting engine include a single view and report for all managed workloads. Usage reports now report in VCSP points to usage consumption reporting, and all report approvals can be triggered from the VSPC UI with those reports automatically delivered.
ConnectWise Automate Plugin
Veeam’s commitment to service providers using ConnectWise for their remote management and automation services continues with the addition of seamless integration with ConnectWise Automate. Automate consolidates client data into a single, proactive centralized user interface, reducing resources and enabling faster response times.
This offers consolidated job management and monitoring with centralized management for Veeam Agents, allowing for the discovery, installation and upgrade of all Veeam Agents via the integrated Automate Plugin.
New platform support
Veeam Backup & Replication v10 was launched in February, and with it came several features and enhancements that our service providers can leverage. Veeam Service Provider Console v4 delivers full support for both Veeam Backup & Replication v10 features such as NAS File Backup, Cloud Connect v10 and vCloud Director 10.0, which allows for tenants and users created in vCloud Director to be used for company creation and backup portal users.
Restful API v3 (preview)
For those service providers who use RESTful APIs to build custom portals for billing and/or self-service or to query data programmatically, Veeam Service Provider Console brings with it a new RESTful API version 3, which is initially in preview. The existing v2 API will continue to function side by side, but most new API enhancements and features will be against v3 moving forward. As such, this is the time for service providers using the v2 APIs to begin migration to v3.
The expanded automation means more actions and endpoints. For VCSP partners who white-label Veeam Service Provider Console, this enhanced RESTful API functionality can be extended down to resellers for more granular, role-based access to the API set.
There is a new Swagger interface that can be used to evaluate and explore new capabilities of the API, as well as generate actions directly from the Swagger UI.
The rest, in brief
This release also delivers 30+ new features and enhancements, including:
- Improved UI views and dashboards, backend server improvements to help better manage their Cloud Connect and server environments
- Better alarms and notifications through an enhanced alarms engine
- A continually evolving Reseller Role feature extending the functionality to ConnectWise
- Usage reporting
There are new security roles to better control access management at move levels. Enhancements to the existing v2 RESTful APIs allow for shared authentication tokens, as well as making it more scalable, with the addition of a new Grafana Labs Dashboard Plugin to monitor and track new v3 API endpoint data for greater visibility.
Veeam Service Provider Console v4 contains several new features and enhancements that continue to make it a critical piece of all Veeam Cloud & Service Provider core infrastructure. The focus on usage reporting, billing and presentation of data goes hand in hand with Veeam’s commitment to improving the management of service provider platforms, as well as their partners and resellers and their own tenants.
By ensuring full Veeam Backup & Replication v10 platform support and Veeam Universal Licensing, Veeam Service Provider Console is more than just a must-have for VCSPs.