[API]New way to gather Horizon Events

A good bunch of my audience has probably already noticed it but with Horizon 8 release 2106 VMware has added a new method to gather Horizon Events: the AuditEventSummaryView query. In this post I will describe how to consume this query using the soap API. I have been told by VMware specialists that this updated version of the eventsummaryview is actually safe to use and wont put a burden on the connection servers.

A quick small script to consume this query could look like this:

[CmdletBinding()]
param (
    [Parameter(Mandatory=$false,
    HelpMessage='Credential object as domain\username with password' )]
    [PSCredential] $Credential,

    [Parameter(Mandatory=$true,  HelpMessage='FQDN of the connectionserver' )]
    [ValidateNotNullOrEmpty()]
    [string] $ConnectionServerFQDN
)

if($Credential){
    $creds = $credential
}
else{
    $creds = get-credential
}

$ErrorActionPreference = 'Stop'

# Loading powercli modules
Import-Module VMware.VimAutomation.HorizonView
Import-Module VMware.VimAutomation.Core

$hvserver1=connect-hvserver $ConnectionServerFQDN -credential $creds
$Services1= $hvServer1.ExtensionData

$queryservice=new-object vmware.hv.queryserviceservice
$defn = New-Object VMware.Hv.QueryDefinition
$defn.queryentitytype='AuditEventSummaryView'


$eventlist = @()
$GetNext = $false
$queryResults = $queryservice.QueryService_Create($Services1, $defn)
do {
    if ($GetNext) {
        $queryResults = $queryservice.QueryService_GetNext($Services1, $queryResults.id) 
    }
    $eventlist += $queryResults.results
    $GetNext = $true
}
while ($queryResults.remainingCount -gt 0)
$queryservice.QueryService_Delete($Services1, $queryResults.id)
return $eventlist

I run it like this, show the event count and the last one

$creds = import-clixml d:\homelab\creds.xml
$events = D:\GIT\Scripts\get-horizon-audit-events.ps1 -ConnectionServerFQDN loftcbr01.loft.lab -Credential $creds
$events.count
$events | select-object -last 1

If you want to filter the data a bit more there are plenty of options for that:

I have added some filtering options to the above script, if you supply the filtertype argument the filterdata and filtervalue are mandatory. Filtertype for now can be either Equals or Contains, filterdata can be any of the data types from the image above and the value is the value you’re going to filter on. To be honest not all of the data types worked when I was creating this post but the message actually did.

[CmdletBinding(DefaultParameterSetName='noFilter')]
param (
    [Parameter(Mandatory=$false,
    HelpMessage='Credential object as domain\username with password' )]
    [PSCredential] $Credential,

    [Parameter(Mandatory=$true,  HelpMessage='FQDN of the connectionserver' )]
    [ValidateNotNullOrEmpty()]
    [string] $ConnectionServerFQDN,

    [Parameter(ParameterSetName='Filter',Mandatory=$true,HelpMessage = "Name of the data type to filter on.")]
    [Parameter(ParameterSetName='noFilter',Mandatory=$false,HelpMessage = "Name of the data type to filter on.")]
    [string]$filterdata,

    [Parameter(ParameterSetName='Filter',Mandatory=$true,HelpMessage = "Value to filter on.")]
    [Parameter(ParameterSetName='noFilter',Mandatory=$false,HelpMessage = "Value to filter on.")]
    [string]$filtervalue,

    [Parameter(ParameterSetName='Filter',HelpMessage = "FIltertype: Equals or Contains.")]
    [validateset("Equals","Contains")]
    [string]$filtertype

)

if($Credential){
    $creds = $credential
}
else{
    $creds = get-credential
}

$ErrorActionPreference = 'Stop'

# Loading powercli modules
Import-Module VMware.VimAutomation.HorizonView
Import-Module VMware.VimAutomation.Core

$hvserver1=connect-hvserver $ConnectionServerFQDN -credential $creds
$Services1= $hvServer1.ExtensionData

$queryservice=new-object vmware.hv.queryserviceservice
$defn = New-Object VMware.Hv.QueryDefinition
$defn.queryentitytype='AuditEventSummaryView'

if($filtertype){
    if($filtertype -eq "Contains"){
        $defn.Filter= New-Object VMware.Hv.QueryFilterContains -property @{'MemberName'=$filterdata; 'value'=$filtervalue}
    }
    else{
        $defn.Filter= New-Object VMware.Hv.QueryFilterEquals -property @{'MemberName'=$filterdata; 'value'=$filtervalue}
    }
}

$eventlist = @()
$GetNext = $false
$queryResults = $queryservice.QueryService_Create($Services1, $defn)
do {
    if ($GetNext) {
        $queryResults = $queryservice.QueryService_GetNext($Services1, $queryResults.id) 
    }
    $eventlist += $queryResults.results
    $GetNext = $true
}
while ($queryResults.remainingCount -gt 0)
$queryservice.QueryService_Delete($Services1, $queryResults.id)
return $eventlist

I run and check it like this:

$events = D:\GIT\Scripts\get-horizon-audit-events.ps1 -ConnectionServerFQDN loftcbr01.loft.lab -Credential $creds -filtertype Contains -filterdata message -filtervalue "has logged in"
$events | Select-Object message -last 10

The last version shown here can be downloaded from my github: Various_Scripts/get-horizon-audit-events.ps1 at master · Magneet/Various_Scripts (github.com)