The VMware Cloud Notification Gateway (NGW) Service was launched back in May 2019 and is used to communicate important customer-facing notifications which can be delivered across a number of different communication channels as shown in the diagram below.
Of all the different communication channels, I think one of the most interesting one is the ability to send an outgoing webhook based on a specific VMware Cloud Event. In fact, this was the very first thing that caught my attention when I had first learned about the NGW Service from Nancy Cheng, the Product Manager for this service.
You can probably guess why I was so excited for this feature as it mimics a similiar capability to our VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) solution. This not only enables our customers to consume other public cloud services that support webhooks but it also opens up the door for more advanced integrations, more on this at the end of this blog post 😀
As of publishing this blog post, there are over 75+ VMware Cloud Events which customers can subscribe to such including when a new SDDC is created or deleted, a new ESXi host has been added either manually or automatically via our Elastic DRS (eDRS) Service, SDDC maintenance notices to subscription reminders to just name a few. Although the default email and UI channels are great, many customers would also like to receive these notifications using other popular communications channels such as Slack or Microsoft Teams.
To help demonstrate the webhook functionality of the NGW Service API, I have created a PowerShell Module for VMware Cloud Notifications called VMware.VMC.Notification which is also published i then Microsoft Powershell Gallery. The module contains the following functions:
- Connect-VmcNotification
- Get-VmcNotificationEvent
- Get-VmcNotificationWebhook
- Test-VmcNotificationWebhook
- Remove-VmcNotificationWebhook