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To enable more control over cloud operations, users can create action plans to run tasks on VMs and scaling groups, and to run general tasks. 

Action plans are an important automation functionality on the platform. They can combine tasks for VMs in different providers and have multiple triggers including alerts from custom metrics or built-in metrics. Each VM or scaling group can have multiple action plans.

Create an action plan

Before you create an action plan, you will probably want to create at least one VM.

To create an action plan:

1. Go to Control view → Action plans, and click the + button 
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2. Enter the action plan details
3. Add actions: 
   1. click the + Add button
   2. select a general action or select a VM or scaling group and a specific action type from the pulldown list
   3. enter parameters as required 
   Consider the following constraints on actions
   
   • Maintenance block: You can create one complete maintenance block (start maintenance, action(s), and stop maintenance) and the maintenance block cannot contain any scaling actions
   • Scale in and/or scale out actions: You can only scale in and/or scale out at the end of the action plan but you can create the scaling action(s) in any order (e.g. scale in first, only scale in)
   • Email actions: You can perform an email action at any time, including after scaling actions
   • Platform constraints: For example, to create an instance, the VM must be deployed and powered off 
   • Hypervisor constraints: For example, when using hot reconfigure on ESXi, you cannot decrement CPU or RAM

Put the actions in run order using the arrow buttons. Delete actions as required using the trash can button to the left of the action name.

To run the action plan automatically, go to the Triggers tab and create an alert or schedule trigger. 

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Run an action plan now

When you have added some actions and saved the action plan, you can run the action plan immediately to test it. Edit the action plan and click the Execute action plan button, which is beside the + add button to create a new action. 

Abiquo recommends that you run an action plan manually to test it before you create a trigger to run it automatically.

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Create a trigger

The platform supports two types of triggers to run action plans: Alerts and Schedules.

To run your action plan based on metrics, you can select an existing alert to trigger an Action plan. Click the + Add button and select the Alert. For details about creating an alert, see #Create Alerts and Alarms

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To run your action plan automatically at selected dates and times, create a schedule trigger.

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Delete an action plan

If you delete an action plan, Abiquo will also delete the schedule associated with that action plan. 

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Scale out VMs

As an automatic response to changing demands for resources, the platform can scale out by cloning a master VM.  And it can scale in, by deleting clone machines and undeploying the master VM.

To use scaling, first define a scaling group, see Monitoring and Scaling VMs

To automate scaling, create an action plan with scaling actions and trigger it with a schedule or a monitoring alert.