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Automating the new VMware Cloud Notification Gateway (NGW) User Notification Preferences

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Last week the VMware Cloud team released one of the highly requested feature which is the ability to control notification preferences for an individual user, which is provided as part of the VMware Cloud Notification Gateway (NGW) service. Users can now login to the VMware Cloud Console (VMC UI) and on left hand side, you should now see a new Notification Preferences tab which will allow you to specify which notifications you wish to receive via the Email channel.


As of writing this blog post, there is currently over 200+ notifications that can be configured which are broken up across the following four categories:

  • Elastic DRS (7)
  • Organization General (128)
  • SDDC Maintenance (61)
  • VMware Site Recovery Service (23)

Today, the notification preferences is configured on a per-use basis and by default, users are automatically subscribed to all notifications. The ability to customize is great but with over 200+ notifications to select or de-select from, this could be a difficult task, especially with a large number of users who may or may not understand each and ever single notification type. This is certainly an area the VMware Cloud team will be looking to enhance in the future to make it even easier to consume and customize.

In the mean time, to help with making this customization change easier within your organization, we can also take advantage of the new NGW Notification Preferences API. What better way to demonstrate this than incorporating this into my VMware Cloud Notification Gateway Community PowerShell Module, which is also available for consumption within the PowerShell Gallery.

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Publishing and consuming custom events with VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA)

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One of the really exciting features that will be included in the upcoming release of the VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) v0.7 release (currently in Tech Preview) is the support for incoming webhooks! This will allow customers to easily build event-driven automation for non-vSphere based events and even non-VMware events while still maintaining a consistent consumption experience. If you are interested in learning more about the upcoming VEBA v0.7 release, Michael Gasch and myself will be doing a LIVE VMworld Session - VEBA Revolutions - Unleashing the Power of Event-Driven Automation #CODE2773 that you should definitely add to your schedule builder!

Webhook support can easily be enabled during the initial VEBA appliance deployment using a few new OVF properties or configured through the VMware Event Router configuration when deploying to an existing Kubernetes cluster using kubectl or Helm. Once the webhook endpoint is running, users can simply publish their custom events as a conformant CloudEvent and VEBA will ensure these custom events are immediately available for consumption by function authors. This means any product and/or service that can construct a custom HTTP payload including headers will be able to take advantage of this new VEBA feature! I also want to mention that this is NOT the only way to produce custom events that VEBA can ingest, but is certainly one simple way.

To help make this concept more concrete, I wanted to see how we could integrate VMware Cloud events into VEBA by using this new webhook mechanism and using the VMware Cloud Notification Gateway. Below is a diagram to help illustrate what is happens when a VMware Cloud event is generated and how it can be consumed by VEBA. The beauty of this type of a solution is the "Event Producer" does not have to know anything about the "Event Consumer" or how they might consume the data. The producer simply pushes events into VEBA and if there is a consumer who cares about a specific event and wishes to do something about it, they can create a function that will listen for a specific event(s) and perform an operation like sending to Slack as an example.

  1. Event is produced by VMware Cloud and pushed by the VMware Cloud Notification Gateway (NGW)
  2. A conformant CloudEvent payload is constructed from VMware Cloud event by NGW service
  3. NGW forwards the custom CloudEvent to VEBA's webhook endpoint (https://[VEBA-FQDN]/webhook)
  4. VEBA functions can now react to these custom CloudEvents (e.g. SDDC Provisioned Event)

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Integrating VMware Cloud Notification Gateway with VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA)

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I previously wrote about the VMware Cloud Notification Gateway (NGW) which provides curated notifications delivered to VMware Cloud on AWS users. By default, NGW supports several  types of notification channels such as email, VMware Cloud Console UI, VMware Cloud Activity Log, vRealize Log Intelligence Cloud (vRLIC) and the vSphere UI when using the vCenter Cloud Gateway. A lesser known feature of NGW is the ability to extend into even more channels by leveraging its webhook functionality which is available when using NGW API.

For a basic "pass through" of the NGW notification to another cloud service such as Slack or Microsoft Teams as example, you can simple setup an incoming webhook on Slack or Microsoft Teams, which I had covered in the previous blog post. From there, you can configure an NGW subscription and forward the NGW notification to the specified incoming webhook.

For more interesting scenarios where customers may want to perform some additional data processing when the NGW notification arrives or run some code/automation and integrate that with other systems which can include your on-premises infrastructure, the basic webhook workflow is not sufficient. Having said that, at the end of the previous blog post I did hint at a solution that would enable customers to support such scenarios which is by leveraging the VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) solution.


The way this works is that we are still taking advantage of the NGW webhook capability but instead of forwarding the NGW notification to a cloud service that supports an incoming webhook, we are sending it to VEBA for processing. Once the notification has been received by VEBA, customers can apply additional logic by using any language of their choice which runs as an automated function and is then responsible for sending the final payload to its destination. This is really the power of VEBA which enables customers to perform any additional processing or business logic to an event before sending it out to its intended target.

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