vRealize Automation 7 – Custom Email Notifications with the Event Broker part Duex

As promised from a few weeks ago I set out to solve the one hole I’ve found with the event broker in vRA 7. As you all know if you read vRealize Automation – Custom Email Notifications with the event broker there are lots of great ways deal with custom html notifications. The event broker exposes all of these phases to take advantage of, the issue of course is that the event broker is only part of those lifecycle phases and doesn’t tie into software components today.

Now with that said it’s important to note that I’m working with our PM team and we should see this as well as a few other gaps solved in the next major release. So with this session my goal is to enable you to utilize the custom email notifications we worked with before and provide a quality work around that will give you the ability to write an html file and then post software deployment provide an approval (again based on EB) to send the written file.

Take a gander at the video.

You can download the package used here from this link

NOTE: If you haven’t yet looked into it I highly recommend looking at the installer package like I’m using here, it makes life much easier and will be my standard delivery of packages moving forward

Once you have the package imported expand the folder VMware -> SDE-SET -> vRealize Automation -> Custom Notifications.

In this folder run the Install Custom Notifications – Post Approvals

This will execute the configuration of your SMTP settings and initiate the file write and read event subscriptions

First is the event subscriptions – You may leave the defaults here

Next is the SMTP server settings

Now we can review the write file code and edit as needed

This is the block that you will want to customize for your html file configuration

Next we look at the read file, nothing will need to be edited here but it is something worth reviewing as it has an approval built into it

From this point forward we can work in the vRA web UI. Start with the Administration -> Events -> Subscriptions, you will see the two workflows we setup with the installer.

Next we need to build an approval policy, go to Administration -> Approval Policies -> Add a new policy and select service catalog – catalog item request

Provide a name, set Status to Active, click Post Approval and + to add a new level

Name the new level, require for all events, and use event subscription

Now that we’ve created the approval policy we just entitle it to the specific software components. I am using my cloud admins entitlement.

Items & Approval and I have my software components in a service offering. I suggest you do the same then only these specific blueprints will trigger the approval email. Modify the Policy

Select the newly created policy

Now you can go request your service and will get the email notifications after the software components complete!