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Forwarding VMC Events to Slack using Log Intelligence Webhook

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VMware Log Intelligence (LINT) is a public VMware Cloud Service that is available to all VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC) customers. LINT provides customers with a unified view of their SDDC infrastructure including vSphere, NSX and vSAN from a logging standpoint and LINT can also be used with an on-premises deployment. The LINT team recently published a nice overview here, which I highly recommend a read.

One really interesting capability of LINT is the alert and notification feature, which includes UI and email, but what really stood out to me with this feature is that you can also trigger a Webhook! This means you can literally integrate with any external system including public cloud services that can receive or process a Webhook. Some examples can include publishing to a specific Slack channel, sending an SMS to your SRE team, an alert in PagerDuty or even calling an AWS Lambda function. The possibilities are truly endless on what you can do with a Webhook integration!

For our recent VMC Customer Summit, I thought it would be really cool to show off some demos on what you could do with LINT Webhooks. In this blog post, I will show you how to use the If Then This That (IFTTT) service which natively supports Webhooks and publish a specific VMC event into a Slack channel. Slack also supports native webhooks, but using IFTTT, you can apply this example to other Cloud Services that you may want to integrate with.


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Enhanced vCenter Server Audit Event & Logging in vSphere 6.7 Update 2

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A couple of years back I had published a detailed analysis on vCenter Server's Authentication (AuthN) and Authorization (AuthZ) from an auditing and logging standpoint. This has been the go to reference for many of our customers and the posts also includes a number of log samples which I have documented in the following Github repository.

In addition to serving as a reference for our customers, it has also helped our Product and Engineering teams understand where we still had some gaps and how we could improve the overall user experience. As hinted in the recently announced vSphere 6.7 Update 2 release, which will be available soon, there are number of new auditing enhancements that have been made to both vCenter Server and the vCenter Single Sign-On (SSO) service that I think customers will really appreciate.

"Real" client IP address in Events

When you look at a login or logout Event in vCenter Server today, you may have noticed the user's client IP Address is actually of the vCenter Server rather than the actual remote client's address and the reason for this is explained here. In vSphere 6.7 Update 2, the real client IP Address is now captured and is included in all successful login/logout and failed logins. This information can now enable administrators to easily identify unauthorized access and be able to quickly track down the systems initiating the connections.

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Integrating Github Actions with vSphere and VMware Cloud on AWS

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I have always been a fan of event-driven automation, the idea where you can automatically trigger a workflow or an operation based on a specific event. In the consumer world, the most popular example is the If This, Then That (IFTTT) service, which I use on a regular basis to automate the sharing of new articles from virtuallyGhetto to different Social Media channels.

For the Enterprise, this is also not a new idea and many folks including myself have been doing this for years in vSphere using vCenter Server Alarms. In fact, one example I still reference on a regular basis is from 2012 where you automatically apply a set of vSphere Security Hardening configurations to a Virtual Machine when a new VM Create Event is published by vCenter.

There are countless more examples of this concept beyond VMware but the general idea is to be able to subscribe to specific events and then automatically do something when a given event occurs. When Github Actions (Beta) was announced last year, I was really interested as I think this could open the door for a ton of interesting possibilities, especially from a VMware perspective around Continuous Integration/Development (CI/CD). I quickly registered for the Beta but did not get access until the start of this year. If you want to know what Github Actions can do, check out some of these demos that have been built by various folks from the community. The really exciting thing about Github Actions is that you can literally execute any workflow as long as you can containerized your business logic within a Docker Container. This means, you can use any language or tool that you are familiar with and make this work with Github Actions, pretty powerful stuff!

It was only recently while working on a personal project, which I hope will make its way to VMworld, that I finally got a chance to dig into Github Actions. I noticed in many of the online Github Action examples, that it included ways to deploy applications and containers to a Public Cloud but there was nothing that I found related to VMware. I figured, this would be a good learning opopournity for myself and I could even learn how to build my own Actions which can be useful for others to use or extend further.

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