Feature Brief: Notifications

Introduction

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. The Notification Gateway serves as the central integration point for customer-facing notifications for VMware Cloud on AWS.

Events are generated by the service or VMware Operators, enabling timely updates driven by specific activities.   Channels deliver notifications to our customers, enabling easy accessibility via multiple avenues. Events flow into Notification Gateway, and the service processes these events into notifications and deliver them to our customers using various channels.  

Examples of events include

• Maintenance Notification and Status update
• Site Recovery Notification
• Elastic DRS Add Host
• User-initiated activity
• Subscription reminder
• SDDC Events

Some of the channels for notification include

• Email
• VMware Cloud Console UI
• vCenter / Cloud Gateway UI
• Activity Log UI/API
• Log Insight Cloud
• Webhooks

Events

Notification Gateway has enabled many notification use cases that greatly improve customers’ Day 2 Operations. Some critical notifications that are currently available via Notification Gateway include:

• 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.

 Here is the full list of the notification and activity events that are currently available through the Notification Gateway service.

Channels

The Notification Gateway service 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.
• VMware vRealize Log Insight Cloud: 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.