Michael Gasch and I recently had an internal discussion with an Engineer about our VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) project and they had shared some additional integration ideas that could be useful for our community. The solution was a cloud service called Zapier, that makes it easy for users (non-developers) to automate workflows across a number of web applications. In the case of Zapier, they have a catalog of over 4k+ integrations and users can also create their integration into Zapier by creating what they call a Zap.
The really cool thing about a Zap is that it can be trigged via an incoming webhook! Why is that cool, well you can probably guess from the title of this article? 😀
Simliar to how VEBA can easily send a notification to Slack or Microsoft Teams via a webhook, VEBA can also be used to integrate with over 4k+ apps within Zapier using this exact same pattern. In fact, the code to trigger a Zapier workflow within a VEBA function is exactly the same and it was literally copy/paste, which took me less than 5 minutes to fully implement!
The use case that I thought would be cool to demonstrate with Zapier is to react to all failed vCenter Server login attempts and automatically send that information to a Google Spreadsheet as shown in the final implementation below.
A huge benefit of using a solution like Zapier is that it simplifies the more complex integrations. One example is if you wish to integrate with Google Docs, you will need to figure out the authentication scheme and understand the required Google APIs and the finally write the code to perform the task you are interested in. With Zapier and simliar solutions, all of that is automatically handled for you and requires very little configuration, which can all be setup using the Zapier UI.
If you are interested in using Zapier or implement the solution above, take a look at the instructions below.
