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Integrate OCI Notifications with Oracle Cloud VMware Solution

Introduction

We’re excited to announce a reference solution for sending notifications from the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Notifications service with the Oracle Cloud VMware Solution. This solution enables our joint OCI and Oracle Cloud VMware Solution customers to use their existing investments in OCI and Oracle Cloud VMware Solution for receiving notifications about infrastructure updates and DevOps-related notifications in an SMS format on their mobile devices.

OCI Notifications is a highly available, low latency publish and subscribe service that makes it easy to receive notifications through email, Slack, and PagerDuty. OCI Notifications also supports triggering Oracle Functions for lightweight data processing. Using OCI Notifications is simple: Create a topic and add subscriptions to the topic for the channels through which notifications are delivered. OCI Notifications integrates natively with the Oracle Cloud Monitoring service for delivering alarm notifications.

Use the OCI Notifications service to send notifications whenever the Oracle Cloud VMware Solution detects a problem for which you want to be notified. You can also create an alarm that is triggered for any health defect in your ESXi bare metal host instances.

Oracle Cloud VMware Solution Bare Metal Instance Alarms

You can enable alarms that monitor your ESXi bare metal host instances. Alarms are triggered when the number of health issues for a bare metal instance are not zero. Any non-zero value indicates a health defect.

When you enable alarms for a software-defined data center (SDDC), all bare metal ESXi host instances in the SDDC are monitored. A separate alarm with a unique name is created for each instance. You can also choose the severity for the alarm, the interval at which the metric is emitted, and the delay time that the condition must be maintained before the alarm triggers.

Oracle Cloud VMware Solution Events

Services emit events for resources or data. For example, the Oracle Cloud VMware Solution emits events for SDDCs ESXi hosts. Services emit different types of events for resources, which are distinguished as event types. For example, SDDCs and ESXi hosts have event types of create and delete. Event types are the changes that produce events by a given resource.

Objectives

Monitor the Oracle Cloud VMware Solution SDDC with OCI Notifications service.

Prerequisites

Review the following resources to understand the concepts for Oracle Cloud VMware Solution and OCI Notifications service:

Task: Configure OCI Notifications with Oracle Cloud VMware Solution

The Oracle Cloud VMware Solution integrates directly with the OCI Notifications service so you can enable notifications from the Create or Edit SDDC workflows. Alarm and notification messages are sent by email or PagerDuty protocol. One notification protocol type is used in an SDDC for all notification messages.

  1. Open the Oracle Cloud Console navigation menu, click Hybrid, and then click VMware Solution.

  2. Click the name of the SDDC to view details.

  3. Click Edit SDDC.

  4. In the Notifications section, enable notifications and provide information about alarms and notifications. For more information, see Configuring Notifications.

    Edit SDDC solution

  5. Enable instance alarms and provide information about the alarm:

    • Alarm name prefix: Each bare metal ESXi host has a separate alarm created for it. Enter a prefix that will appear at the beginning of the alarm names for this SDDC.

    • Alarm severity: Choose a severity for the alarm. You can choose Info, Warning, Error, or Critical. All non-zero health issues for a bare metal instance will trigger an alarm with the selected severity.

      Edit SDDC solution notification

  6. Select an existing notification topic or create a new one. To create a new topic, choose Create new and enter the following information:

    • Topic name: Enter a friendly name for the notification topic.

    • Subscription protocol: Choose the protocol that you want to use to receive your notifications. Default is email.

    • Email Address: Choose the email address or address list you want to send the notification to.

    • Notification compartment: Choose a compartment for the notification.

      Edit SDDC solution notification

  7. Choose events that you want to receive notifications for. By default, all available notifications are selected.

    • To deselect a notification event, click the X on the notification.

    • To select a notification event, click on the selection field and select the notification from the list.

  8. Click Save Changes. After saving the Oracle Cloud VMware Solution SDDC, the solution runs the workflow to define the alerts, rules, and subscription registration.

    verify workflow

  9. The last step you need to complete for getting the alerts is to confirm your subscription to the e-mail you have configured. See the following image for an example confirmation e-mail.

    verify email

Next Steps

Where can I find the Oracle Cloud VMware Solution Notifications configuration?

Where can I find the Oracle Cloud VMware Solution Alarms configuration?

Where can I find the Oracle Cloud VMware Solution Rules configuration?

Cost for integrating OCI Notifications with Oracle Cloud VMware Solution

Using the OCI Notifications service is free for the first million messages and 100 SMS messages per month. For more information, see Notifications.

Notification Cost Notification Cost1

Acknowledgments

Author - Eran Maor (Principal Cloud Solution Architect)

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