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The Control tab enables Users to detect and automatically meet changing demands for resources on the platform. The foundations of the control system are metrics, which can be standard metrics from a provider or hypervisor, or custom metrics that the user creates and populates with values using the Abiquo API. Administrators can create custom metrics for infrastructure and all users can create custom metrics for virtual resources.
There is an Alarms tab in the Infrastructure view for data centers, racks, physical machines, and VM entities on the Infrastructure path. And there is another Alarms tab in the Virtual datacenters view, for virtual resource entities, including VDCs, VApps, VMs, and scaling groups.
Users can detect changes in metrics using Alarms and Alerts. 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. Alerts are like a worker monitoring a group of alarms; when all the lights for the group are lit up, the alert is activated.
Screenshot: Create alarm - the platform uses alarms to detect if a metric passes a threshold. Users create alarms for metrics by specifying the conditions with which to evaluate the metric
Screenshot: Alerts - Users can create Alerts on the control tab. An Alert can notify users or trigger an action plan when a group of alarms are triggered, which means that a group of metrics passed certain thresholds.
Users can define Scaling Groups with rules for how to add more VMs or retire them. When the platform scales out, it will clone VMs according to the scaling rules.
Users may wish to automate the response to resource demands of their applications and increment resources or VMs using action plans and scaling groups.
- Create a VM and enable metrics
- Create a scaling group for the VM with scaling rules and click Add
- If the scaling group is in maintenance mode, disable maintenance mode
After the User defines a scaling group, the platform will ensure that it contains the minimum number of VMs in the scaling group definition. To scale out or scale in automatically, the user must create an action plan with scaling actions..
An action plan allows the user to define a sequence of actions to perform general actions, or actions on a VM, or a scaling group. Users can scale up a VM by adding more resources, perform deploy and power actions. To add more VMs to a scaling group or scale in to retire VMs, users can add a scale out or scale in action.
Screenshot: An action plan
After the User saves the action plan, they add schedules or alerts to run the action plan automatically.
Screenshot: Creating an Interval schedule for running an action plan. An Advanced schedule is a calendar schedule, as shown below the Interval schedule
Screenshot: Alerts for running an action plan