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Excerpt
hiddentrue

Use alerts with notifications from alarms across the platform and action plans for automation of VMs including vertical and horizontal auto-scaling

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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.

Basic control and scaling concepts

ConceptDescription
MetricA built-in metric that is provided by a hypervisor or provider (e.g. CPU usage) or a custom metric that the user creates and populates using API calls
AlarmAn 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
AlertAn 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 plansA sequence of actions to perform on entities on the platform, such as VMs or scaling groups. An action plan is run by a trigger.
TriggerA trigger is an alert or a schedule that will run the action plan, for example, during times of increased demand. 
Scaling groupFor 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 scalingVertical scaling means scaling up, adding more resources to an existing VM, for example, boosting your CPU and or RAM capacity.
Horizontal scalingHorizontal scaling means scaling out, deploying more VMs when you need more resources. 

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  1. Go to Virtual datacenters
  2. Go to Virtual Appliances → Virtual machines. Create and configure your VMs. See Manage Virtual Machines
    1. Remember to enable metrics. See VM monitoring and metrics
  3. Go to Virtual appliance → Monitoring and check that the platform is retrieving metrics. You may have to wait a few minutes
  4. Go to Alarms. Create alarms for built-in metrics, scaling group metrics, and custom metrics as required

    1. To create alarms, go to an 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

  5. Create alerts to notify users. See Manage Alerts.  

    Expand
    titleClick here to show/hide the UI instructions

    Include Page
    GUI Create alert
    GUI Create alert


    • You can also use these alerts to trigger scaling, see Cloud bursting. 
      v44_ctl_alerts_create_alert.png


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  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. See Manage Action Plans. For example, use scaling actions to add more VMs for your application or to retire VMs that are no longer needed. Save the action plan, and then add .
  9. Add an alert to trigger the action plan or create a schedule to run it.

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