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Custom webhook function to publish events into VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA)

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In my previous article, I demonstrated how you can leverage the upcoming v0.7 release of the VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) to publish and consume custom events to easily extend your event-driven automation to other event sources. As a recap, this is accomplished by constructing and sending a conformant CloudEvent to VEBA, which can then be consumed by your functions.


This is perfect for external event sources that can create a custom HTTP payload that conforms to the CloudEvent specification, however not all solutions have this type of functionality or flexibility. An alternative solution to this is to simply create a VEBA function that can accept a custom payload and then handle the transformation of the data into a valid CloudEvent and then forward that off to broker running within VEBA. This is just one of the many benefits of Knative, the backend for VEBA, where each function deployment includes an endpoint that is automatically served as a subdomain to the VEBA hostname (e.g. https://my-function.NAMESPACE.VEBA-FQDN)


This solution would enable external "Event Producer" to send a non-CloudEvent payload which can then be processed by your function and re-publish as a conformant CloudEvent that can then be consumed by other function and services.

  1. Event Provider would make HTTP request to the function webhook with a custom payload
  2. A conformant CloudEvent payload is constructed by the webhook function
  3. Webhook function will then forward the CloudEvent internally to the VMware Event Broker Appliance
  4. VEBA functions can now react to these custom CloudEvents

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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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Tech Preview of Horizon Provider for VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA)

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Last week, Michael Gasch and I had the pleasure of presenting the VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) solution to the Omaha VMUG community. The session was an introduction to VEBA, but we also covered some brand new topics including writing your own functions for VEBA and a quick look at the evolution of VEBA.

Note: For those interested, the recording for the Omaha VMUG session can be accessed here with following password: MYN%0k9

One of the topics that I was really looking forward to sharing with the VMUG audience was a sneak peak at our upcoming v0.7 release which will include two new Event Providers: Webhook and VMware Horizon!

About a month back, I had teased some upcoming collaboration with Chris Halstead, famous for his VMware Horizon Flings and there was some good speculation and hope that this would mean VMware Horizon support for VEBA.

I am excited to share that we have been working on a new VMware Horizon Event Provider for VEBA and this will allow users to easily build and consume event-driven automation reacting to a number of VMware Horizon events! In fact, this was only made possible with the new Horizon Audit Events API that was recently introduced in the latest Horizon 2106 release which now has over 850 different events!

We are really excited to see what our users will do with this new functionality and if you are interested in trying out the Tech Preview of the VMware Horizon Provider for VEBA simply join the VEBA Slack Channel and you will be able to download the latest OVA appliance.

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