Basic control concepts
Alarms
An alarm is like a red light on a dashboard, because it activates when a metric passes a certain threshold. Alarms can be based on either built-in metrics from the hypervisor or cloud provider, or on custom metrics.
Alerts
Alerts enable you to configure notifications or actions for the VMs in a virtual appliance. Alerts are in turn based on your alarms for VM metrics. To create an alert, you will simply need to select a group of alarms to monitor. When all the alarms in the group are activated, the alert will perform the action you specify, such as sending you an email.
Action plans
A sequence of actions to perform on a virtual appliance. It is run by a trigger.
Autoscaling
To perform autoscaling, which is either kind of scaling triggered automatically, you can configure an action plan and a trigger to run the action plan.
Vertical scaling
Vertical scaling means adding more resources to an existing VM, for example, boosting your CPU and or RAM capacity.
Trigger
A trigger is an alert or a schedule that will run the action plan, for example, during times of increased demand.
Horizontal scaling
Horizontal scaling means deploying more VMs when you need more resources. In Abiquo, this is configured with a scaling group and scaling actions are created as part of an action plan that is then run by a trigger.