Control View

To help you detect and address changing demand for resources, the platform's control features include monitoring alerts with notifications, action plans for automation, and autoscaling.

Control and scaling concepts

Create alerts to notify users and trigger automation

The platform's Alerts feature enables you to track and act upon changes in your cloud environment. To configure Alerts do these steps:

1. Go to Virtual datacenters → Virtual Appliances → Virtual machines. 
2. Create and configure your VMs. See Manage Virtual Machines
   1. Remember to go to Monitoring and fetch metrics. See VM monitoring and metrics. 
      • You can also create custom metrics using the API. See Custom Metrics Resources. 
3. Go to Virtual Appliances → Monitoring and check that the platform is retrieving metrics. You may have to wait a few minutes

4. Create alarms for built-in metrics, scaling group metrics, and custom metrics as required

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

   2. Select an entity, a metric, and a metric statistic and enter a threshold

   3. Save the alarm
      

5. Create alerts to notify users

   To create an alert:

   1. Go to Control → Alerts
      
   2. Click the + add button

   3. Enter the alert details and assign alarms
      

      

      
      

      Field	Description
      Name	Name of the alert. The name can contain up to 128 characters
      Description	Describe the alert
      Muted	Select this checkbox to disable action when the alert is activated
      Email	List of email addresses to notify when the alert activates. Click Add email to save each address
      Alarms	Click the + Add button to assign alarms to the alert. You must assign at least one alarm to be able to save the alert. Select an existing alarm, or create a new alarm, and assign it to the alert. Repeat for the required alarms

   4. Click Save

   • You can also use alerts to trigger scaling, see Cloud bursting. 
     

Configure cloud bursting

You can perform cloud bursting with the platform's Control features. Cloud bursting is automatically deploying new resources in any part of your hybrid cloud environment to meet a peak in demand for resources. Here is a brief outline of how to configure cloud bursting with VM automation.

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

6. 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 the Alarms tab in either the Virtual datacenters view (see Manage cloud alarms) or the Infrastructure view (see Infrastructure Alarms).

   2. Select an entity, a metric, and a metric statistic and enter a threshold, then save the alarm

7. Create alerts to notify users and to trigger scaling. See Manage Alerts.
8. 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
   
   

   Field	Description
   Virtual machine	The name of the VM
   Name	The name of the action plan
   Description	A description of the action plan
   Actions	See List of actions for action plans
   Action parameters	See Action parameters table. 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

   
   

   Action parameters table

   Action	Parameters
   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
   Send email	Subject Body To (email addresses). Click the add + button to add an email address Cc (copy to these addresses)
   Set hardware profile	Select from the available hardware profiles

   
   

   
   

9. 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 → edit action plan
   2. Go to Alerts
   3. Click the + Add button and select the 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 → edit action plan
   2. Go to Schedules
   3. 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.

Pages related to control of VMs

• Main VM configuration page: Configure Virtual Machines
  
  • VM monitoring and metrics
  • Manage Scaling Groups
  • Manage cloud alarms
  • Manage Alerts
  • Manage Action Plans
• Configure VM Monitoring and Metrics