Today we can send vRLI Alerts to vROps, we can generate emails on them, and there are out of the box Webhooks for Slack, Pager Duty, and vRO. What about Microsoft Teams? Well, we can create a custom Webhook for it, so what does that look like.
Let's first generate a TEAMs URL to which we will point our Webhook. Go to Teams, select your Team, then go to the three dots top right.
Select Connectors.
Click Add and then Add which will add the Incoming Webhook to the Channel. We now need to configure it. Go back to the three dots top right and select Connectors.
You'll notice it shows a Configure button now, select that.
You'll give it a name, adjust the associated image if you want, then click Create. Once you click Create, a URL is generated for you.
This is the URL to which you will send your vRLI Alerts. Click Done. Let's now configure the Alerts in vRLI to be sent to Teams. Log into vRLI, go to Alerts - Webhook and select NEW WEBHOOK.
From the Endpoint dropdown, you'll have four options.
There are built-in Endpoints for Slack, Pager Duty, and vRO. There is a Custom option for others, like Microsoft Teams. Each Endpoint has its own Advanced Settings and Payload, the Custom Endpoint looks like this.
The Webhook URL is the Teams URL we previously created. Content Type provides the payload format (JSON or XML). Action determines the method (POST or PUT). Authentication is optional and provided via the Authorization fields. You can add Custom Headers if you wish. The payload and its parameters are available at the bottom, this is how you format your message to Teams. Mine looks like this.
Click TEST ALERT to test the Webhook.
As you can see, I've been testing, and my latest test is shown at the bottom. At this point, we can now use the Microsoft Teams Webhook in vRLI Alert definitions. I've created an Alert around the query "failed" using our new Webhook.
I've adjusted the Webhook payload to include a link to vRLI, it looks like this.
We now wait for a "failed" log in vRLI, which we just got.
Which generated a Microsoft Teams message.
Clicking the link in the message takes the user back to the vRLI query. This is just one use case for vRLI Custom Webhooks, they can be used for other endpoints as well. VMware Staff Technical Account Manager Brian Wuchner published a nice video on this same topic, you can see it here. For more information on vRLI and vRLI Cloud, go here.