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VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) v0.8.0

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I am very excited to share that we have just released our long awaited v0.8.0 of the VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA)! 🥳


The v0.8.0 release has been in the works for quite some time and because of the major architectural change in migrating to the VMware Tanzu Sources for Knative, we also needed to update all example functions to reflect the new event payload schema, refresh all user documentation and our VEBA website, which only performed during our spare cycles and typically in the evenings!

It has certainly been a long journey and I could not have done it without my colleague Robert Guske, who has been a machine in updating all of our documentation to make it easier to consume for both our existing and new users. 🙌

Last but now least, I want to give a huge thanks 👏 to my original partner in crime Michael Gasch, while he is no longer with VMware, he was still kind enough to help answer some questions while hitting some release automation issue over the weekend and was instrumental in helping me get the v0.8.0 release out!

Changelog for VEBA v0.8.0:

  • Updated Software Build-of-Material (SBOM) (See the VEBA BOM for detailed changes)
  • Replaced VMware Event Router with VMware Tanzu Sources for Knative
  • All VEBA endpoints now protected with basic authentication
  • New Google Chat notification function
  • Migrated function container images from Google (GCR) to Github (GHCR)
  • Updated all PowerShell/PowerCLI functions with the latest PS/PCLI base images
  • Improved website documentation
  • Various Bug Fixes and Code Improvement

Download for VEBA v0.8.0: 

Google Chat space notification for failed vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) backups using VEBA

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It is always good idea to verify that your vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) backups are occurring and if there are any failures, you are notified about them immediately!

As alluded to at the end of that blog post, you can easily build event-driven automation using the popular VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) solution, triggering notifications based on several types of VCSA backup events:

  • com.vmware.applmgmt.backup.job.failed.event
  • com.vmware.applmgmt.backup.job.finished.event
  • com.vmware.applmgmt.backup.job.start.event

I recently built a PowerShell function that would send a notification to a Google Chat space by enabling their incoming webhook integration as you can seen from the screenshot below:


While the message customization is not as extensive as using Slack (e.g. supporting advanced layouts and emoji), it does get the job done and you will know immediately when a backup has failed or when it has started or has completed.

Note: For existing VEBA users (pre-v0.8 release), the function.yaml needs to be updated to trigger off of the subject keyword rather than the type, which is due to replacing the event router with Tanzu Sources for vSphere. You also need to ensure the prefix of "com.vmware.vsphere" is removed along with trailing "v0" as this is the next syntax for vCenter Events once VEBA v0.8 is released.

spec:
  broker: default
  filter:
    attributes:
      subject: com.vmware.applmgmt.backup.job.failed.event

Integrating VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) with Zapier

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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.

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