Control View

1. In your virtual datacenters, create and configure networks 
   1. To optionally use VPNs between VDCs (see Connect virtual networks with VPNaaS), use networks with different addresses, e.g. the default network and a custom network set as the default, see Manage Networks
2. Create and configure your VMs. See Manage Virtual Machines
   1. Remember to enable metrics. See VM monitoring and metrics.

3. Define scaling groups for VMs. The base VM can be deployed or undeployed. See Manage Scaling Groups

   

4. To use autoscaling in the same provider, while you are creating the scaling group, select the Create autoscaling action option

   1. After you save the scaling group, select the Metric(s) that will drive the scaling
      

   2. To check and further configure the scaling, click Show more
      
   3. Optionally add more metrics

The platform will automatically create scaling actions that are driven by alarms and alerts on your metrics. 

To list the alarms, alerts, and action plans created by the platform, display or edit the scaling group.

1. If the scaling group is not in Maintenance mode, click the magnifying glass information button

If the scaling group is in Maintenance mode, click the pencil edit button

Then go to Autoscaling action and click Show more

You can later display and modify the components of the autoscaling action in the platform. Just go to Virtual datacenters → Alarms, Control → Alerts, and Control → Action plans 

The autoscaling actions configure cloudbursting in the same cloud provider as your original VM with metrics. To configure cloud bursting across providers, you can link an autoscaling group in another provider to your original VM metrics. 

To trigger scaling on a schedule, skip the alarm and alert steps and create an action plan with actions on the scaling group and one or more schedule triggers. You do not need to create alarms and alerts, but you may like to create them anyway, because they can be very useful to help you control your cloud resources.

The following steps describe how to manually enable autoscaling, so that you can configure cloud bursting across providers.

To manually create autoscaling actions:

1. Deploy VMs
2. Go to Virtual appliance → Monitoring and check that the platform is retrieving metrics. You may have to wait a few minutes

3. Create alarms for built-in metrics, scaling group metrics, or custom metrics. See Custom Metrics Resources.  To work with auto-scaling, we recommend that you create alarms for both the high threshold, when you will require more resources, and the low threshold, when these resources can be retired

   1. To create alarms, go to Virtual datacenters → Alarms (see Manage cloud alarms) or Infrastructure → Alarms (see Infrastructure Alarms).

   2. Select an Entity, a Metric, and a Metric statistic and enter a Threshold, then save the alarm

4. Create alerts to notify users and to trigger scaling. See Manage Alerts.
5. Create action plans for cloud bursting and other automation. For example, use scaling actions to add more VMs for your application or to retire VMs that are no longer needed
   
   General information

   

   
   

   
   

   Field	Description
   Name	The name of the action plan
   Description	A description of the action plan

   Actions

   

   
   

   Action Notes and Parameters table

   Action	Notes and Parameters
   Virtual machine
   Increase CPU	vCPUs
   Decrease CPU	vCPUs. Not supported by hot-reconfigure. Check OS compatibility
   Increase RAM	RAM RAM unit of GB or MB
   Decrease RAM	RAM. Not supported by hot-reconfigure. Check OS compatibility RAM unit of GB or MB
   Resize disk	Amount Disk unit of GB or MB Selected disk
   Instance	Name for Instance (clone) template. The platform will append the date to the name supplied All disks or selected disks
   Set hardware profile	Select from the available hardware profiles
   General
   Send email	Subject Body To (email addresses). Click the add + button to add an email address Cc (copy to these addresses)
   Send webhook	See webhook parameters table
   Scaling group
   Start maintenance
   End maintenance
   Scale in
   Scale out

   Webhook action attributes table

   
   

   Attribute	Description	Required	Default value
   Endpoint	Where to submit the request	true
   HTTP Method	The type of request can be GET, POST, or PUT	false	GET
   Expected HTTP status code	If this status code is returned, continue running the action plan	false	204 No Content
   Request headers	Headers such as, secret, authentication, and content-type	false
   Request content	Request body	false

   ---

   When you create actions on VMs also consider the following constraints.

   • User constraints: e.g. allocation limits
   • Platform constraints: e.g. to create an instance, the VM must be deployed and powered off 
   • Hypervisor constraints: e.g. when using hot reconfigure on ESXi, you cannot decrement CPU or RAM

   For the API, note that you can request the JSON schema for each action plan entry type from the API.
   See: https://wiki.abiquo.com/api/latest/ActionPlansResource.html#list-action-plan-entry-templates

   
   

6. Add an alert to trigger the action plan or create a schedule to run it
   
   The platform supports two types of triggers to run action plans: Alerts and Schedules.

   To run your action plan based on metrics, select an existing alert with these steps:

   1. Go to Control → Action plans
   2. Select an action plan
   3. Below the Alerts panel, click the + add button
   4. Select an alert. For details about creating an alert, see Manage Alerts

   
   

   To run your action plan automatically at selected dates and times, create a schedule trigger with these steps:

   1. Go to Control → Action plans
   2. Select an action plan
   3. Below the Schedules panel, click the + add button
   4. Enter the details of the schedule

   

   • To run the action plan at intervals of a fixed number of seconds within a set timeframe:

   1. 1. Select an Interval schedule
         
      2. Enter the following parameters
         
         1. Interval seconds: the number of seconds from when the action plan excution starts to when it will start again
         2. Repeat count: the number of times to run the action plan. A value of 0 means repeat forever
         3. Start time: date and time
         4. End time: date and time
   2. After you create an interval schedule, the platform will display the execution count of how many times the action plan has run. If the repeat count is 0, the execution count is null

   • To run an action plan as specified using a Cron-type schedule, select an Advanced schedule and use the calendar selector.