What's new in VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) v0.7

The VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) team is excited to announce the availability of the highly anticipated VEBA v0.7 release! This is by far our largest release to date with the number of new features and functionality that has been added by our contributors. This has really been the result of closely collaborating and listening to the feedback provided by our VEBA users and community and helping drive our overall roadmap.

For those wishing to learn more about VEBA and the new v0.7 release, I did want to mention the following two VMworld 2021 sessions that may be of interests:

Without further ado, let's dive right into the new features!

VMware Horizon Event Provider

VMware Horizon users can now get the same event-driven automation benefits that vSphere users have enjoyed with the new VMware Horizon Event Provider. We added this feature as Tech Preview back in August and the feedback has been extremely positive. Users will need to be running the latest version of VMware Horizon 2106 which introduces a new Audit Events API. Enabling the new event provider is super simple by configuring a few properties as part of the VEBA appliance deployment.

Once configured, users will have access to over 850+ different VMware Horizon events and can now easily build various automation operations reacting to specific VMware Horizon events. Here is an example PowerShell function that will send a custom Slack notification when a failed login attempt is detected on the VMware Horizon Admin Server.

Note: For those interested in learning more about VMware Horizon use cases with VEBA, be sure to check out VMworld 2021 session Troubleshoot Your Horizon Deployment #EUS1929 for more information.

Generic CloudEvent Webhook Event Provider

With the introduction of a generic CloudEvent webhook provider, VEBA can now be extended to ingest non-vSphere/Horizon events which conform to the CloudEvents specification and deliver additional event-driven automation capabilities to other event sources. Example event sources capable of creating CloudEvents include, but are not limited to, VMware Cloud Service, vRealize Operations and vRealize Operations Cloud, vRealize Log Intelligence and vRealize Log Intelligence Cloud as well as non-VMware products/services like AWS EventBridge (API Destinations).

This is definitely one of my personal favorite new features of the v0.7 release and I was super excited to build a reference example which allows our VMware Cloud customers to now forward any event from our VMware Cloud service including SDDC and other solutions directly to VEBA, which can then easily be consumed to build some really cool event-driven automation.

We are really excited to see what our users will do with the new CloudEvent webhook event provider. Internally within VMware, we have already seen several teams take advantage of this capability and easily add event-driven automation to their offering. Enabling this new event provider is super easy and is part of the VEBA appliance deployment.

Note: For those interested in learning about other potential use cases with the new Webhook Event Provider within VEBA, be sure to check out VMworld 2021 session Edge Services Observability for Zero Trust Network Access #VI1201 for more information.

Day 2 Operations Improvements

As VEBA is becoming more and more critical to our users' infrastructure, we wanted to provide additional visibility in terms of resource utilization (CPU, Memory, Storage & Network) and also enable easier function troubleshooting and debugging.

Monitoring

cAdvisor is now included within VEBA and will provide users an understanding of the resource usage and performance characteristics of their running functions (containers). Users will be able to access the graphical cAdvisor dashboard by navigating to https://[VEBA-FQDN/top

In addition to the default dashboard, the aggregated statistics provided by cAdvisor can also be consumed by vRealize Operations Management and users can monitor their VEBA deployment(s) using this awesome vROPs VEBA dashboard built by Robert Guske.

Logging

Users can now configure VEBA to forward all logs, including logs for their functions to an external syslog server such as vRealize Log Insight. Setup is straight forward with a couple of inputs during the VEBA appliance deployment. This feature uses fluentbit and will automatically be setup for log forwarding

Note: For those interested in learning more about Day 2 Operations with VEBA, be sure to check out VMworld 2021 session Open Source Appliances in Production: Day 2 Ops with VMware #APP1378 for more information.

New Function Examples

We have added a bunch of new Knative function examples that show case all the cool things that can be done with VEBA and hopefully spark some new ideas from our users. For a complete list of all Knative function examples, please visit: https://vmweventbroker.io/examples-knative and we certainly welcome contributions from the community!

VEBA Website Update

We have made a number of updates to the VEBA website including documentation to reflect all the new features, architecture and best practices. You can check out the VEBA website at: https://vmweventbroker.io/

Event Processor Deprecations

With the introduction of the Knative Event Processor, the VEBA team has been able to deliver a number of innovations over the past several releases. This has really benefited our community, especially in the area of function development and consumption. With all these benefits and use cases being covered by Knative, we can now further streamline and optimize our development efforts for VEBA. As a result, both the OpenFaaS and EventBridge Event Processors are now deprecated in the v0.7 Appliance release and will be removed in the v0.8.0 release. Users that rely on either of these event processors will still be able to consume them in the v0.7.0 release, but we strongly recommend to migrate to the new Knative event processor.