Monday, December 5, 2016

The Self-Healing Data Center Part 5: Configure an Alert to Trigger the vRO Workflow

Now that we have configured the Translation Shim and vRealize Orchestrator the next task before testing is to configure vR Ops to send an alert to the shim.  This will be the final post in this series and when you complete this, you will be ready to apply this solution to automate any alerts you desire by simply creating the appropriate workflow and alert settings.

I am using vR Ops version 6.4 in the steps below, but this should work with any 6.0 or higher version of vR Ops.  We are also using Endpoint Operations to monitor the state of a service on a Linux OS.  Endpoint Operations is NOT required to use this shim, I am only using that because it provides a way to easily trigger an alert by stopping a service on a monitored OS.  It also shows that any automated remediation or activity is possible, not just automation of virtual infrastructure.

Saturday, December 3, 2016

The Self-Healing Data Center Part 4: Configuration of the vRO Example Workflow

So far we have discussed the reasoning behind the Translator Shim, installed it, configured it, started and tested the shim server.  In this blog post, we will set up things on the Orchestrator side so that the workflow is ready to go when an alert is fired from vR Ops.

This blog post assumes you have familiarity with vRealize Orchestrator and some experience with importing workflows and working with the HTTP-REST plugin.  If these are new concepts for you, please don't be discouraged.  Some great references to get comfortable with Orchestrator are:


HOL-1721-SDC-5 - Introduction to vRealize Orchestrator
Blog from vcoteam.info on using the REST plugin
Postman + vRO = HTTP-REST Plug-in Operations

Let's dive in.