CategoryScripting

Postman Collection for vRealize Network Insight APIs

When developing automation and using APIs, Postman is a very welcome tool. I use it to test out API calls and to make sure I format the calls correctly, before translating it to the code of whatever I’m working on.

Postman Collections are a library of API calls and all their available options for easy and quick access to every call you often use.

vRNI API

I’ve been using a half-baked Postman Collection for the API calls I’ve been doing to Network Insight, in order to develop PowervRNI and other things. It wasn’t complete by a long shot.

Earlier this … Read more

Integrating ServiceNow with Network Insight

In a previous post, Integrating vRealize Automation with Network Insight, I covered how greenfield applications can be automatically pushed into vRealize Network Insight to provide application context with the analytics of Network Insight. This post is about importing brownfield into Network Insight to get insights into the behavior of your existing applications. Specifically, importing CMDB information from ServiceNow.

Disclaimer: This is something I built, it is not officially supported by VMware.

CMDB

In the case of existing applications, your Configuration Management Database (CMDB) should be your source of truth. There are a lot of CMDB products out there, … Read more

Using PowervRNI to configure SNMP settings on data sources

Version 1.2 of PowervRNI was just released and it contains 2 new cmdlets: 

  • Get-vRNIDataSourceSNMPConfig
  • Set-vRNIDataSourceSNMPConfig

You can use these cmdlets to see and update SNMP configuration on specific data sources. All Arista, Brocade, Cisco, Dell, and Juniper devices are data sources where SNMP can be enabled for richer data collection. This basically turns on interface counter collections, so you can have pretty graphs like this: 

Examples

To give you an idea of how to use these new cmdlets, check out the examples below. Of course, there is also documentation available in the module itself, viewable via the Get-Help cmdlet. 

Get-vRNIDataSourceSNMPConfig

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vRealize Orchestrator Workflow with vRA Event Broker to get Deployment Info

vRealize Orchestrator (vRO) can be a beast. In both in capability and the difficulty in getting exactly the data you want. For a project I’m working on, I wanted to get a list of VMs including tier names, and the deployment name that was deployed from vRealize Automation (vRA). One of the requirement is that I can get this after the entire blueprint has deployed and all at once. Then I want to process this VM list and deployment data, more on that in a future post.

To begin, vRA needs to notify vRO when it has finished deploying a … Read more

Storing the VMware NSX config in version control

Almost any organization that I’ve had the pleasure of talking with, uses Git either for code repositories where their developers work or for doing version control on their infrastructure systems. Git is an excellent version control tool and is widely used for both developers and also infrastructure configuration. This post goes into how to put the VMware NSX configuration into version control using Git.

Not all infrastructure components (server systems, network devices, etc) have a proper audit log on what happens in the configuration and who is doing what exactly. This is where version control can lend a helping hand … Read more

VMware NSX & OTRS – Automating Security with Help Desk Systems

Over the last couple of months, Sander, Anne Jan and I have been working on a security whitepaper that lays out a practical implementation of zero trust while interfacing with a helpdesk system. In this case, OTRS.

It’s all about how engineers can get access to servers to perform maintenance, once your environment is properly micro-segmented. This whitepaper talks about the challenges you have when you’re micro-segmented and how you can resolve these challenges. Using OTRS as an example, this document lays out how to configure a help desk system like OTRS to interface with NSX to gain network … Read more

PowervRNI is now on PowerShell Gallery

PowerShell is about making things easy and consumable. Same goes for PowervRNI, making repetitive tasks in vRealize Network Insight easier and make it possible to extract information from vRNI.

It’s not that easy to load a custom module into PowerShell though, you have to download 1 or 2 files, then load it into your PowerShell session by referencing those local files. The PowerShell Gallery is a pretty awesome way to also make module management very easy. All you have to do is use the Install-Module command and it downloads and installs the module for you.

For the module authors, … Read more

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