Posted on by Luis Freixas

Veeam B&R Notifications in Telegram

First, this is just for fun and was set up in my lab for testing.

I’d been thinking about this for a while. Email notifications are fine, but when your inbox is full and you receive 100 or more messages a day, important ones can get missed. I wanted a way to receive important alerts outside of email, which is how I came up with the idea of getting Veeam notifications through Telegram!

Let’s take it step by step. First, we’ll create a Telegram bot to receive messages, then route them to a group chat or somewhere else:

In Telegram:

  1. Type @BotFather in the Telegram search bar.
  2. Choose the first option, marked with a red verification check (this confirms it is Telegram’s official bot).
  3. Click START
  4. Type the command /newbot or click it in the list of commands shown in the chat.
  5. Next, enter a name for your bot and press Enter (for example, Telegram_Notifier).
  6. You’ll now be asked to set a username, which must end in “bot” (for example, telegramnotifierBot).
  7. Done! Save the token somewhere safe; we’ll need it for authentication later. Click the link to your new bot to open its chat.
  8. Now we need our Telegram ID, so we’ll use another bot:
    Open IDbot and enter the /getid command.
    It will reply with your ID: …
    Make a note of it too.

In Windows, I created a PowerShell file called telegram.ps1 with the following content:

Function Send-Telegram {
Param([Parameter(Mandatory=$true)][String]$Message)
$Telegramtoken = "AQUÍ DEBEIS PEGAR VUESTRO TOKEN"
$Telegramchatid = "AQUI EL ID"
[Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol = [Net.SecurityProtocolType]::Tls12
$Response = Invoke-RestMethod -Uri "https://api.telegram.org/bot$($Telegramtoken)/sendMessage?chat_id=$($Telegramchatid)&text=$($Message)"}

$A = Get-WinEvent -MaxEvents 1  -FilterHashTable @{Logname = "Veeam Backup"}
$Message = $A.Message
$MachineName = $A.MachineName
$Source = $A.ProviderName

Send-Telegram $Message

Save it wherever you like. Edit it to include your TOKEN and ID!

Next, we’ll use Windows Task Scheduler. I’ll include screenshots to make it easier.

Open Windows Task Scheduler.

Follow the wizard.

Continue.

In the list, select the event log source Veeam Backup. Under Source, select Veeam Backup; we’ll add a second source later.
Choose to start a program.
IMPORTANT: The program is PowerShell!
For the argument, enter the full path to the PowerShell .ps1 file you saved earlier.

Finish.

Now edit the task’s properties.

Set the options as shown in the screenshot: run it continuously and do not store a password.

Here we choose which events trigger the task. Add Veeam Backup; we’ll add the other one next.

Check that everything looks right.

The scheduled task is ready!

Everything is configured. Let’s run a quick test. Open Veeam B&R, if it isn’t already open, go to Configuration Backup, and increase the configuration backup retention by one day. You should receive a notification in Telegram:

Configuration job has been modified.

If you start a backup job, you’ll receive a notification like this:

From here, fine-tune the events you want to receive from Veeam B&R through Telegram in Task Scheduler.

I hope this is useful.
I’m no programmer, so if you improve it (which I’m sure you will), get in touch so we can update the post and make the Telegram notifications even better!

Regards.