In response to VMware Cloud on AWS customers highlighting the importance of being able to receive customized timely notifications for their IT infrastructure, we’ve upgraded our notifications capability. Nancy Cheng, senior product manager at VMware, unveils the latest Notification Gateway, a central integration point for customer-facing notifications for VMware Cloud on AWS.
The ability to receive timely and easily accessible notifications that are customized for your IT infrastructure environment is an important aspect of your Day 2 operations. We listened to you, our customers, and introduced a new capability called the Notification Gateway to serve as the central integration point for customer-facing notifications for VMware Cloud on AWS. This capability was first made available in May 2019 and we have been innovating on it ever since.
At a high-level view, events would flow into Notification Gateway, and the service would process these events into notifications and deliver them to our customers using various channels.
- Events that are generated by the service or VMware Operators – enabling timely updates driven by specific activities
- Channels that deliver notifications to our customers – enabling easy accessibility via multiple avenues
Here are some examples of the events and channels that Notification Gateway supports today:
Events
Since the launch of the service, Notification Gateway has enabled many notification use cases that greatly improve customers’ Day 2 Operations. In the image above, I highlighted a few critical notifications that are currently available via Notification Gateway.
Let me elaborate on some of them:
- Maintenance notification and status update: You get email notifications when maintenance events are scheduled, started, and completed. You will also see detailed SDDC upgrade events in your Activity Log UI in real time. For example, you will see events like the upgrade of NSX Edges, back up of management VMs, and addition of temporary hosts during the maintenance cycle.
- Elastic DRS for VMware Cloud on AWS add host: When Elastic DRS adds a host for you due to your storage, CPU, or memory utilization, you will receive an email notification as well as a banner notification in the console UI.
- User initiated activity: This includes user-initiated activities like the deployment of SDDC, provisioning of ESX hosts, creation of subscriptions, and some operator activities, such as the creation of SSH access, which means that a service operator requested delegated access to your service console. Some customers would need this type of event for security auditing.
- Subscription reminder: 30 days and 60 days before your subscription expires, you will receive an email as well as a console UI reminder.
The service team is working on expanding additional notifications, such as host failure, edge failover, and so forth. Here is the full list of the notification and activity events that are currently available through the Notification Gateway service. We will keep updating this documentation.
If there are other notifications you would like to see, submit your ideas here.
Channels
The Notification Gateway service currently supports the following channels:
- Email: Emails are being sent to every organization owner and member who has access to VMware Cloud on AWS service.
- VMware Cloud on AWS console UI and Cloud vCenter / Cloud Gateway UI: The service also supports banners and pop-ups in the UIs.
- Activity Log: Enables you to access your activity and notification log under the Activity Tab in the service console.
- Webhook: Enables you to subscribe to specific events in your organization and have those events pushed to other third-party channels, such as Slack, PagerDuty, and ServiceNow. Stay tuned for future documents and blogs on some of these popular use cases.
- VMware vRealize Log Insight Cloud: The feature was enabled on 2/27/2020. All the activity and notification events that happened after the day can be found in vRealize Log Insight Cloud. See the filters of the events available.
| Notification Channels | VMware cloud on AWS Console UI and vCenter/Cloud Gateway UI | Activity Log | vRealize Log Insight Cloud | Webhook | |
| What are available through these channels | A pre-defined set of notifications would be sent through these channels | All notifications and activities would automatically show up | All notifications and activities are available but require user configuration | ||
| Priority | Critical notifications that have workload or billing impact, such as maintenance and Elastic DRS add host event | Critical and helpful information, such as a new SDDC version is available. | Apply to all priorities | ||
Resources
For other information related to VMware Cloud on AWS, here are some more learning resources for you:
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- You can learn more about our VMware Cloud on AWS service at the VMware Cloud on AWS website or by viewing VMware Cloud on AWS: Overview.
- Follow us on Twitter @vmwarecloudaws and give us a shout with #VMWonAWS.
- Watch informative demos, overview videos, webinars and hear from our customers: VMware Cloud on AWS on YouTube.
- Try the VMware Cloud on AWS Lightening Lab for a first-hand immersive experience.
- Read our latest VMware Cloud on AWS blogs.
- Obtain the VMware Cloud on AWS Solution Brief and VMware Cloud on AWS TCO one-pager.
- Follow the VMware Cloud on AWS release notes on continuing updates.
- Read Technical Guides on Operations, Applications, and Performance.
- Explore Feature Walkthroughs of Deployment, Configuration, Networking, and more.
- Listen to latest episodes of VMware Cloud on AWS Unplugged Podcast
