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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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Extending VMware Cloud on AWS Notifications using the Notification Gateway API

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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

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Forwarding VMC Events to AWS Lambda/CloudWatch using Log Intelligence Webhook

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In my previous post, I provided an example on how customers can take advantage of Log Intelligence's Webhook capability to consume VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC) based events and extend that to other Public Cloud Services like Slack as an example to build new and interesting integrations. We took advantage of the fact that some of these Public Cloud Services either have native webhook support or have a built-in Webhook listener like IFTTT which in turn can support other services which may not have native Webhook support.

However, customers can also build their own Webhook listener, which is nothing more than being able to POST to an API endpoint with a pre-defined JSON payload. In fact, this would be needed for any on-premises integration if the solution does not support webhooks.

For VMC customers who currently consume AWS Services such as Lambda and CloudWatch, it is actually very easy to integrate these and other AWS Services directly using LINT's Webhook feature. In fact, I chose Lambda and CloudWatch as these are two of the mostly frequently asked integration points. At our recent VMC Customer Summit, which took place last month, I had built a demo based on an actual customer use case for sending specific VMC Events from LINT to Cloud Watch as that was their tool of choice for auditing purpose.

I decided to make use of Lambda as it allowed me to quickly integrate with CloudWatch and I could also show how lambda integration would work given the number of customers asking. Ultimately, Lambda also enabled me to easily build a Webhook listener to process the LINT Webhook by simply front-ending the Lambda function with an AWS API Gateway, which was super easy to setup and use.

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