Monitoring and Control

To help you detect and address changing demand for resources, the virtual appliance has Monitoring and Control features. Go to Virtual datacenters, select a virtual appliance and then select the Monitoring or Control tabs.

Basic control concepts

Alarms

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. 

Alerts

Alerts enable you to configure notifications or actions for the VMs in a virtual appliance. Alerts are like a worker monitoring a group of alarms; when all the lights for the group are lit up, the alert is activated. Abiquo alerts can also trigger action plans.

Action plans

A sequence of actions to perform on a virtual appliance. 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. 

Vertical scaling

Vertical scaling means adding more resources to an existing VM, for example, boosting your CPU and or RAM capacity.

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, which are part of an action plan that is run by a trigger.

Monitor virtual appliances

The Abiquo monitoring system displays VM metrics and the user can configure alerts to trigger actions if certain conditions are met within virtual appliances. If your virtual datacenter supports monitoring, but you don't see any metrics for your virtual appliance, you may need to edit your VMs and configure monitoring on the VM monitoring tab. See VM monitoring and metrics

 Then you can configure the display of metrics at the virtual appliance level.

 To configure the refresh interval, select the Refresh data every checkbox and enter a number of minutes. Then choose the metrics you wish to display and filter by metric statistics.

Create Alerts and Alarms

You can configure alerts, with their associated alarms, and action plans on the control tab. In order to create an alert, you will need to select or create alarms that will activate when VM metric thresholds are surpassed. 

In order to create alarms that are not associated with alerts, edit your VMs and configure alarms for VM metrics. See VM Alarms. 

Display VM alarms and alerts

To view a list of alerts and their associated alarms, open the Control tab. 

The muted alerts have an alert "speaker" symbol without sound waves. The alerts that are not muted have an alert symbol with sound waves.

Create alerts for VMs

Before you create an alert for the VMs in a virtual appliance, remember to do the following steps when editing the VMs:

1. Enable VM monitoring (see VM monitoring and metrics)
2. Create VM alarms (see VM Alarms

To create an alert for the VMs in a virtual appliance

1. Open the virtual appliance Control tab
2. Click the + add button
3. From the drop-down list, select Create alert
4. Enter the alert details

5. Assign existing alarms to the alert, or create new alarms and then assign them to the alert.

6. Click Save

If all alarms are activated, the alert will be activated. You can use the alert to trigger actions. See Manage action plans and triggers.

Manage alarms for alerts

To manage monitoring alarms and alerts requires the privileges to Manage alerts and Manage alarms and Access alerts section. From the virtual appliances screen, you can manage alarms for alerts, and you can create alarms to assign them to alerts. To edit or delete alarms that are not attached to alerts, open the VM and modify it on the Alarms tab; see VM Alarms.

   

Create an alarm

To create an alarm for any VM in the virtual appliance:

1. At the top of the Alerts panel, click the + add button 
2. Enter the alarm details.
   
   • Abiquo recommends that you enter a name that will uniquely identify the alarm
   • See VM Alarms for details of the Alarm fields, which are the same as on the Alarms tab of the VM
3. To save, click the floppy disk icon. The platform will create the alarm
4. Remember to add your alarm to an alert because the platform will not do it automatically!
5. To manage an alarm that is not in an alert, go to the VM Alarms section, which requires the Access alarms section privilege

Modify or delete an alarm associated with an alert

To modify or delete an alarm associated with an alert:

1. In the virtual appliance, open the Control tab and select the alert
2. In the Alerts list, open the alert to list the alarms. Select the alarm
   
   • To delete an alarm, click the delete button, and confirm
     The platform will delete it from all the alerts that it is associated with
   • To modify the alarm, make your changes, and click Save

To manage an alarm that is not in an alert, go to the VM Alarms section, which requires the Access alarms section privilege

Create action plans

To enable more control over cloud operations, users can create VM action plans to run tasks for VMs and Docker workloads. 

VM action plans are for both private and public cloud and are an important autoscaling functionality on the platform. A VM can have mutliple action plans

In the user interface, in the Virtual appliances view on the Control tab, users can manage Action plans and Triggers that run the action plans.

Create an action plan

Before you create an action plan, first create a VM. To create an action plan:

1. Open the Control tab of the virtual appliance and click the + button 
2. Enter the action plan details
3. Add actions, by clicking the + Add button, selecting the action type from the pulldown list and entering the parameters as required. Consider the following constraints on actions
   
   1. 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
   2. 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)
   3. Email actions: You can perform an email action at any time, including after scaling actions
   4. Platform contstraints: For example, to create an instance, the VM must be deployed and powered off 
   5. 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. 

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.

Create a trigger

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

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

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

Delete an action plan

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