vCoffee : Drink coffee and check your backup jobs from your smartphone

For some months now I had the idea to make an App for Veeam Availibility Console (VAC) and / or Veeam Backup & Replication (VBR). While getting a coffee in the morning I noticed, people spend quite a lot of time queuing or waiting for the machine to deliver the coffee.

That's why I'm glad to introduce vCoffee today. It is a small app, currently available in alpha which you need install manually on your Android device. The app itself is rather simple: You login, get an overview of all jobs and you can see the latest state. If required, you can click the job, and start the job directly from the app. As a bonus, you also get an "RPO" indicator, which tells you if the jobs started in the last 24h. So if the job was successfully but didn't run for the last 5 days, this will also be indicated in the first screen.

What I'm also really excited about is that it covers both VAC REST API and VBR REST API. This means that as a partner, you can check all your customers or tenants from the app. As a customer, you are able to monitor your VBR server via the Enterprise Manager. Do note that REST API is part of the Enterprise Plus licensing.

One thing that is really important is that Android seems to be quite paranoid about security and this means that you can not use self signed certificates. For VAC, I don't think this is a big issue but maybe for enterprise manager, you might have used self signed certificate. That's why I also would like to refer to my colleague Luca Dell'oca. He wrote an excellent article about "Let's encrypt". I used the article for both VAC and Enterprise Manager. For enterprise manager, if you have already installed it, there is an excellent article that explains how to replace the certificate.

Here is a small demo of the app. I can tell you that on my native phone it works a lot faster but due to the Android emulation, it looks quite slow in the demo.

The code is released under MIT License on VeeamHub, the Veeam community which get contributions from Veeam employees but also external consultants an Veeam enthusiasts.  This means that everybody can contribute and reuse the code as he or she likes. It also means that no responsibility will be taken and you can not contact Veeam Support for help. Basically, this app was not developed by Veeam R&D and has not been checked by Veeam QA.

In a follow up article, I'm planning to discus the VAC REST API, because I was amazed how simple this really was. This because the app itself is JavaScript code and the JSON support of the VAC REST API makes parsing the objects extremely simple

Finally, you can download a debug build here as long as I'm not running out of bandwidth usage.