Control

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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.

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.

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.

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.

Click here to show/hide the task: Define a scaling group

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
1. Enter the Name, Default cooldown and number of VMs
2. Create default rules for 1 VM and optionally create more rules
3. Click Save
4. Select the Metric for the autoscaling actions and click Add
If the scaling group is in maintenance mode, disable maintenance mode

When the User defines a scaling group, they can automatically define a scaling action. The platform will automatically create the appropriate alarms, alerts, and action plan with scaling actions.

Users can also create action plans to define a sequence of actions to perform at a scheduled time. Examples of actions are adding more resources to a VM, deploy, and power actions, as well as adding more VMs to a scaling group, or scaling in to retire VMs.

Screenshot: An action plan

Users can run action plans automatically based on schedules or alerts.

Screenshot: Creating an Interval schedule for running an action plan. An Advanced schedule is a calendar schedule