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Heads Up - Potential missing vCenter Server Events due to sequence ID overflow

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We had a few users who had reported issues with using the VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) solution where VEBA was not receiving any events from the connected vCenter Server. This was really puzzling for the team to debug because the user clearly saw events in both the vSphere UI as well as using vSphere Automation Clients like PowerCLI.

After a bit of debugging with a few of our users (huge thanks to Michael Gasch for driving this), we discovered that in certain environments, the generated sequence number that is used for the vCenter Event ID has overflowed and causes the value to have a negative number. To further complicate the debugging, there are actually two ways of fetching vCenter Server Events using the vSphere API. The first is to just look at the LatestPage property, which will return the most recent events and not care about event ID and the second is to use CreateCollectorForEvents() which is more of an event stream and it does care about the event ID being non-negative. You can probably guess which vSphere API VEBA was using, not only because of our check-pointing feature but LatestPage could lose events from a client request point of view for chatty environments.

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vSphere Event-Driven Automation using VMware Event Router on VMware Cloud on AWS with Knative or AWS EventBridge

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The VMware Event Broker Application (VEBA) is a popular VMware Event-Driven Automation solution that can be consumed using either the open source or commercial offering from VMware. The commercial offering of VEBA is already available to customers today via our Tanzu Application Platform (TAP) offering, which I have previously written about here. The open source offering of VEBA can be consumed in either a pre-packaged Virtual Appliance or a native Kubernetes Application called for those with an existing Kubernetes cluster.

Deploying the VEBA Virtual Appliance is well documented (here and here) and I wanted to spend some time covering the native Kubernetes deployment model, as it there are actually a couple of options and most recently, this came up in a customer discussions as they were interested in forwarding vSphere Events from VEBA to AWS EventBridge.

In the open source version of VEBA, there is a component called the VMware Event Router, which is responsible for connecting to an event source such as vCenter Server and then forwarding those events to a processor which can either be a a function that you have written to react to a specific event using Knative or to AWS EventBridge to integrate with other AWS native services like CloudWatch as an example.

To demonstrate the two different ways to deploy the VMware Event Router, I have created the following Github repo https://github.com/lamw/vsphere-event-driven-automation-vmware-event-router that provides an example to easily deploy the VMware Event Router to an existing Kubernetes cluster. For my environment, I will be using VMware Cloud on AWS and the managed Kubernetes offering called Tanzu services, which is included as part of the base offering and there is no additional cost of running the Kubernetes infrastructure, which is certainly an added bonus 😀

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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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