Improving the vRA Admin Experience – Reservation Alerts to Slack

The Reservation system in vRealize Automation (vRA) provides a bucket of resources to a team or business unit via Business Group.  A risk with Reservations comes about with how I think VMware intended them to be used vs how some organisations may use them.  I suspect VMware’s intention was that Reservations should be self-managed by the Business Group associated with it.  This makes sense if each individual team has a Business Group as the scope of what’s in the Reservation is “their stuff”.  It would mean if a Reservation reached capacity, it would be up to that team to manage the situation.

What if the Business Group was being used differently, where it covers multiple teams?  In the event of the Reservation becoming full, the scope is larger than one team.  In this situation, it might be good to get a heads up on when Reservations are running low on resources.  Email alerts can be setup and yes, sent through to Slack, the formatting in Slack is less than desirable.  So I decided to look at a way of doing it better.

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