vRealize Automation Event Broker focus on passing properties

vRealize Automation gives you a great deal of Out of the Box features. It also gives you a great deal of extensibility capabilities.

Since a Cloud Management Portal is a central point of interaction between users and the Software defined Datacenters it would be great to have the ability to catch events going through this platform and trigger actions at just the right time.

Let's say machines deployed for Business Unit A need to update CMDB A and machines deployed for Business B need to update CMDB B, your CMP need to react accordingly right?

The Event Broker feature in vRealize Automation is exactly about that.

You need to block provisionning of Oracle software to have managers approval, Event Broker will help you do that.

You need to add a machine to a DNS, also with Event Broker.

A new service is added to your catalog and you want to be notified, Event Broker again!

The list is endless.

Bottom line, it's great to have the ability to catch event at the CMP level.

It's even better to have the ability to trigger workflows when these events occurs.

Of course, this workflow will need to understand the context to be effective a.k.a they'll need to understand the "properties" and that's what this article is about.

Basically, vRealize Automation will send these properties as a "payload" to vRealize Orchestrator.

These properties will contain stuff such as lifecycle stage, configuration, name, etc...

Basically, a lot of things!

The hard thing is to understand what are the information in the payload and this is what I want to help you to understand.

Before we go further here, I strongly suggest you read these 2 articles explaining how event broker work:

Exploring the vRealize Automation 7.0 Event Broker – Part 1

Exploring the vRealize Automation 7.0 Event Broker – Part 2

Now, we are going to focus further on the properties passed from vRealize Automation in vRealize Orchestrator. By seeing all the properties, you'll be able to face pretty much every situation.

First, open your vRO client and import this workflow.

This workflow basically take the payload as input and will display all the properties each time it is triggered.

Now, let's configure vRealize Automation to trigger it as much as possible!

Go to the event Broker and click New

Select Machine provisionning, click Next

You better select a condition such as the name of a specific blueprint

Now, select the workflow you previously imported, click Next, Finish.

We're done for the setup.

Now, let's see what it gives us.

Request the blueprint you set in the "Conditions" step and watch the vRO interface.

Basically, you see the Workflow is triggered for all the lifecycle stage and for each of them you see what's inside the payload.

I think it's a very useful to understand the interaction between the event Broker and vRealize Orchestrator and open a breadth of opportunities.

Enjoy.

PS: once you've seen what happens after requesting the machine, you can have the same level of information for other lifecycle stage such as destroy, etc...