Morpheus Extensibility with Plugins

By: Brian Wheeler

The Morpheus platform includes dozens of codeless integrations to address the platform’s most common use cases. There are situations where a custom-tailored integration is necessary to help an organization address a specific business use case. The Morpheus plugin architecture provides an extensibility framework that enables these organizations to extend the platform to meet their needs. The plugin architecture includes several plugin types with the most commonly listed below:

  • Custom Reports
  • Instance UI Tab
  • Service Catalog Layout
  • Automation Task

Custom Reports Plugin

The Morpheus platform includes 30+ reports out of the box for everything from cloud spending to virtual machine inventory. The custom reports plugin provider enables administrators to develop custom reports using data from the Morpheus database or external API endpoints. The example below is a custom report that provides an overview of automation tasks executed in the platform.

Custom morpheus report

Instance Tab Plugin

The Morpheus platform provides a self-service platform for the provisioning and day 2 management of workloads. The day 2 management features include performance monitoring, logging, console access, and more. But there is often contextual data or actions in external systems or platforms that would be helpful if they were available in the Morpheus UI. The custom instance tab plugin provider enables administrators to add a custom UI tab to their workloads. The example below is a custom instance tab that integrates with the DataDog monitoring platform to bring contextual data from DataDog into the Morpheus platform’s UI.

Custom instance UI tab

Service Catalog Layout Plugin

The self-service catalog is a core feature of the Morpheus platform that simplifies requesting IT resources by abstracting the underlying complexity of the request. The custom service catalog layout plugin provider provides a mechanism for customizing the layout of a catalog item in the Morpheus service catalog. The look and feel of the catalog item becomes fully customizable. The example below is a custom catalog item that includes a custom link. The link opens a modal that displays automation examples for the catalog item.

Custom service catalog layout

The VIEW AUTOMATION EXAMPLES link opens a modal and triggers Javascript code that dynamically generates the automation example for the Morpheus CLI and a JSON payload for the REST API.

Custom catalog layout automation example

Automation Task Plugin

The automation engine in the Morpheus platform enables administrators to associate automation with the lifecycle of a workload along with the ability to execute ad-hoc automation. The custom task plugin provider provides a mechanism for adding new automation task types to the Morpheus platform. This provides a method for creating robust automation tasks with a simplified interface. The example below is a custom Slack task that can be used to send Slack messages by providing the destination channel along with the message.

Morpheus custom automation task

Conclusion

Morpheus plugins enable organizations to unlock the extensibility capabilities of the platform to better integrate with technologies in their environment. Additional details about the Morpheus plugin architecture can be found at https://developer.morpheusdata.com/.

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