Trigger an event broker event by updating a custom property

[jbenning]

I've got a custom property for a virtual machine that is in a property group. Its part of the blueprint and gets set to a value at request time by users. I'd like to enable users to update this property at a later date, and have it trigger a vRO workflow.

I've been trying to use "virtualMachineAddOrUpdateProperties" in the Machine Provisioning topic, without much luck.

To be clear, this update property request would be happening well after the machine is provisioned. Does any one have any tips or ideas?

[daphnissov]

What version of vRA is this? I'm almost certain there's no EBS hook you can make by changing the value of an existing property on a deployment. So you may have to have some sort of scheduled vRO workflow that scavenges the managed entities and watches for a property change. It's an interesting one. Could you describe your use case for wanting such functionality? I for one am curious as to what you're thinking.

[jbenning]

vRA version is 7.3

The properties in question are being passed from vRO to Ansible Tower for linux OS configuration, keytab creation, etc. they are AD group names that control ssh access and sudo access on the guest system. I’d like users to be able to update the login and sudo permissions on their lab boxes without having to manually update config files, or use some other CMDB.

I suppose having a job run every few minutes woulnt be the end of the world, but less elegant. I did find that one of the topic groups (not provisoning... away from my pc at the moment) did trigger an event if I reconfigured the hardware, but not if I updated a property.

[daphnissov]

The only other option, which may be better, is for you to create a vRO workflow that embeds the AddOrUpdateProperties action into a single blueprint that you publish as XaaS. The request form would take in the the new value from the user and then change the value, afterwards kicking off whatever you want. You could publish this as a resource action and entitle it to existing deployments rather than a new catalog item.

[jbenning]

Thank you for the suggestions! I think I'll end up creating a custom action for these machines. That seems the most appropriate anyway.