vRealize Operations doesn’t live or work on an island in the datacenter. Recently, I learned how vRealize Ops can integrate with any tools that support a RESTful API – which includes just about every modern collaboration tools in the world today.
There are so many cool use cases for extending and integrating vROps with other software in the datacenter or public cloud!
MOST Common vRealize Operations Integrations
Here are some of the more common:
Northbound integration-
- Notifications to ChatOps tools like Slack or PagerDuty
- Ticket integration into a service desk like Bugzilla, ServiceNow, and ZenDesk
Southbound integration-
- Deploy new applications or reconfigurations using vRealize Automation
- Kicking off vRealize Orchestrator workflows to remediate an issue discovered by vROps
Bring data into vROps-
- Update vROps objects with rich data from external sources
- Show relationships between the virtual infrastructure objects and external systems
DevOps and vROps integration-
- Programmatic access to vROps for monitoring of dev/test environments when simulating production workloads
- Pull or push data to Dev tools such as Jenkins, Bugzilla, and Jira
LESS Common vRealize Operations Integrations
We talked about the most common, widely used integrations for vROps but what about some of the uncommon or least common integrations?
Here are a few very cool but likely unknown vROps integrations that I discovered in my research:
- The Echo Show project by John Dias of VMware
- The World Cup Soccer dashboard and the World Cup of Cricket dashboard posted by VMware’s Sunny Dua
- Using an Arduino to display vROps metrics in a homelab by Matt Bradford of VMware (and his cool blog VMSpot)
Those are REALLY COOL, am I right?
What Do I Need To Know?
To help you get stated, here are a few resources and tools that you should be aware of:
- Public documentation for the vRealize Operations RESTful API
- The VMware Code API Explorer can be very useful
- Postman Client Collection Tool for vRealize Operations
- VMware’s PowerCLI has the ability to integrate with vRealize Operations
- John Dias of VMware has a great 3-part blog series showing how to use PowerCLI for programmatic access to vROps as well as the full RESTful API. Those blogs can be found at- 1) Getting Started with PowerCLI for vROps 2) Part 2- Working with Recommendations and Statistics 3) Part 3 – Using the Full vROps API
Note that samples are available at John’s GitHub page
Finally, it’s important to point out that Webhook Shims can make your integrations MUCH easier. According to Alan Castonguay, Functional Architect and Product Owner at VMware –
“Webhooks are user-defined HTTP callbacks. Something happens in an application (e.g. alert fired, change made, commit merged, etc) that some remote service cares about. It doesn’t matter why they care, they just want to be told that some event happened. It could be for auditing, or to start a workflow, or something else.”
More information on Webhook Shims can be found at – https://blogs.vmware.com/management/2017/01/vrealize-webhooks-infinite-integrations.html
So I challenge you – what can you do to integrate your tools with VMware vRealize Operations?
