Introduction

In this blog series we are going to discuss ways to utilize Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Observability and Management services and apply them to network resources with examples.  Below are 3 common requests that I’ve received from customers that we will go over in more detail in this and future blogs in this series.

Before we dive in to Part Two for this blog, let’s briefly review some of the relevant OCI services that we’ll be covering.

Notifications Service

The OCI Notifications service enables you to setup communications channels for publishing messages using topics and subscriptions.   When a message is published to a topic, the Notifications service sends the message to all of the topic’s subscriptions.  Supported subscription methods include:

  • Email
  • Oracle Function
  • https custom url
  • PagerDuty
  • Slack
  • SMS

See the below link for more detailed information on the OCI Notification Service:
https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/Notification/Concepts/notificationoverview.htm

Events Service

OCI services emit events, which are structured messages that indicate changes in resources.  An event could be a create, read, update, or a delete (CRUD) operation, a resource lifecycle change, or a system event impacting a resource.  OCI event messages follow the CloudEvents industry standard format hosted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) which allows for interoperability between various cloud providers.  For example, an event can be emitted when a security list rule is added, updated, or deleted.  

You work with events in OCI by creating rules.  Rules include a filter you define to specify events produced by the resources, and specify an action to trigger when the filter finds a matching event.  You can deliver events to the OCI Notifications, Streaming or Function services with a rule.

See the below link for more detailed information on the OCI Events Service:
https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/Events/Concepts/eventsoverview.htm

How can I be proactively notified when network changes are made?

In Part One of this series we went over the steps to review the OCI Audit log to find any recent changes that were made that could have caused an issue.  The example scenario was a recent change to a security list that caused SSH sessions to no longer connect.  Below we will go over the steps to utilize the OCI Events and Notifications services to proactively send notifications when similar changes are made in the future.  We will first create a Notification Topic and Subscription, and then we will create an Event rule that will trigger when a specific change is made to send the Event to the Notification Topic.  

Creating a Notification Topic

  • From the OCI console, go to Observability & Management >> Notifications to get to the Notifications page and make sure you select the correct Compartment
  • Under Topics click the blue Create Topic button
  • Type a name for the Topic, in our example we will use Network_Change
  • When finished, click the blue Create button at the bottom.


 

Creating a Subscription

  • Once the Topic is created in the step above, it should take you to the Topic details screen.  If not, navigate to the Notifications page again and select the Topic you created above (Network_Change)
  • Click the blue Create Subscription button
  • Select the protocol we want to use.  In our example we will use email, but other protocols are supported such as Slack, SMS, and Pager Duty.
  • Input the email address we would like the notifications sent to.

  • Click the blue Create button at the bottom when finished
  • After the Subscription is created, a confirmation email will be sent to the email address we provided and we will need to click on the link in that email to confirm the subscription.  When you confirm the subscription, the subscription state in the console will change from yellow Pending state to green Active state.

  • We can also do a quick test of the subscription on the Topic Details page.  Click on the top Publish Message button, enter some text into the message and title and click the blue Publish button.  We should receive an email shortly after with the text that we inputted which will validate the subscription is working.

Creating an Event Rule

  • From the OCI console, go to Observability & Management >> Events Service >> Rules to get to the Rules page and make sure you select the correct Compartment
  • Click on the blue Create Rule button
  • Type a name, in our example we will name it Network_Change_Rule
  • Under Rule Conditions select Networking under the Service Name
  • Under Event Type we will select all of the event types that we wish to be alerted on.  In our example we want to be alerted on any changes to Security Lists so we will select Security List – Update.  Note that you can select multiple Event Types
  • Under Actions select Notification for Action Type, the Compartment, and the Topic that we created in the above step.  In our example the Topic is Network_Change

There you have it, we are now setup to receive email notifications any time a change is made to a Security List.

Stay tuned for part three of this series where I will go over how to set up similar notifications to alert us of potential outages with FastConnect or VPN.