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.

Control and scaling concepts

Create alerts to notify users and trigger automation

The platform's alerts feature enables you to track and act upon changes in your cloud environment. To configure Alerts do these steps:

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. 
      • You can also create custom metrics using the API. See Custom Metrics Resources. 
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.  

   
   

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

Cloud bursting

You can perform cloud bursting with the platform's Control features. Cloud bursting is automatically deploying new resources in any part of your hybrid cloud environment to meet a peak in demand for resources. Here is a brief outline of how to configure cloud bursting with VM automation.

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. 
   
9. 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.
10. Add an alert to trigger the action plan or create a schedule to run it.

Pages related to control of VMs

• Main VM configuration page: Configure Virtual Machines
  
  • VM monitoring and metrics
  • Manage Scaling Groups
  • Manage cloud alarms
  • Manage Alerts
  • Manage Action Plans
• Configure VM Monitoring and Metrics