| Concept | Description |
|---|
| Alarm | An alarm activates when a metric passes a certain threshold. If you imagine a dashboard for your metrics, alarms are like red lights that light up when conditions change, for example, when there is a problem. See Manage cloud alarms and Infrastructure Alarms |
| Alert | An alert enables you to configure notifications or actions from alarms. Alerts are like a worker monitoring a group of alarms; when all the lights for the group are lit up, the alert is activated. Alerts can trigger action plans. See Control View |
| Action plans | A sequence of actions to perform on entities on the platform, such as VMs or scaling groups. An action plan is run by a trigger. |
| Trigger | A trigger is an alert or a schedule that will run the action plan, for example, during times of increased demand. |
| Scaling group | For horizontal autoscaling, create a scaling group for a VM with rules to define how the platform should scale it out. You can then include scaling operations in an action plan. |
| Vertical scaling | Vertical scaling means scaling up, adding more resources to an existing VM, for example, boosting your CPU and or RAM capacity. |
| Horizontal scaling | Horizontal scaling means scaling out, deploying more VMs when you need more resources. |