{"id":965,"date":"2022-03-27T14:01:02","date_gmt":"2022-03-27T13:01:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thomas-kopton.de\/vblog\/?p=965"},"modified":"2022-03-27T14:01:02","modified_gmt":"2022-03-27T13:01:02","slug":"vrealize-operations-and-telegram-alerts-on-your-phone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thomas-kopton.de\/vblog\/?p=965","title":{"rendered":"vRealize Operations and Telegram – Alerts on your Phone"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

As you all know vRealize Operations<\/mark><\/strong> is a perfect tool to manage and monitor your SDDC and in case of issues vROps creates alerts and informs you as quickly as possible providing many details related to an alert.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Without any additional customization, vRealize Operations displays the alerts in the Alerts tab. Sending alerts via email is the most common way to quickly attract your attention and increase the chances of reacting to the alert quickly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With the Webhook Notification Plugin<\/mark><\/strong>, it is possible to integrate vROps with almost any REST API<\/mark><\/strong> endpoint. Telegram<\/mark><\/strong> provides an easy-to-use API and allows for sending vROps alerts as messages into a Telegram chat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Telegram Chat, Bot, and Token<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

The first step is to prepare Telegram to allow vROps to send messages to a chat. Basically, you will need a chat<\/mark><\/strong>, a bot<\/mark><\/strong>, and a token<\/mark><\/strong>. The process is very well described here<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The actual REST API POST call uses the chat ID and the Token to ingest messages into the chat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

https://api.telegram.org\/bot$token\/sendMessage?chat_id=$chat&text=Hello+World<\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\n
The POST content is pretty simple.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
{\n  \"text\": \"my message\"\n}<\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\n
vROps Outbound Instance<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
The next step is the vROps Outbound Webhook Plugin<\/mark><\/strong> instance that will point to our telegram chat. For simplicity, the Outbound URL contains the entire URL we need to send messages to Telegram.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In my environment, the instance looks like depicted in the following figure, bot ID and token are truncated for visibility and my data privacy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/a>
Figure 01: Outbound Webhook Plugin instance.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
You do not have to specify any user or password as the ingestion uses the token in the URL. When you run the test you will see an error but this is in our case OK.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
vROps Payload Template<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Following the Outbound Plugin instance, we need to specify the details of the REST call<\/strong> and the payload<\/strong>.  In my example, I would like to receive datastore space-related alarms in my chat. Details of the alert definition are not described in this post.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Payload Template is where we define these settings, subdivided into:<\/p>\n\n\n\n