Manage Action Plans

To enable more control over cloud operations, users can create action plans that will automatically run tasks on VMs and scaling groups, and to run general tasks. 

Action plans are an important automation functionality of the platform. They can combine general tasks with tasks that run on VMs and scaling groups in different providers and have multiple triggers including alerts from custom metrics or built-in metrics and schedules. Each VM or scaling group can have multiple action plans.

To display action plans:

1. Go to Control → Action plans

Before you create an action plan, consider the elements that you wish to automate with the action plan. Create VMs or scaling groups, fetch metrics, and create alarms and alerts.

To create an action plan:

1. Go to Control → Action plans, and click the + add button 
2. Enter the action plan details
   
3. Go to Actions to add actions: 
   
   
   1. Click the + add button
   2. Enter action details
      1. Type: Select a general action or select a VM or scaling group
      2. Decrease CPU/RAM: you cannot use this with hot-reconfigure and you must check that the OS is compatible

      3. Instance: Name for Instance (clone) template. The platform will append the date to the name supplied

      4. Webhook action - Expected HTTP status code: If this status code is returned, continue running the action plan. Default: 204 No Content

      5. Email action - To, CC: Enter email addresses as a comma separated list

   For more details, see UI reference: GUI Create action plan
4. Put the actions in run order using the arrow buttons

To run the action plan automatically, go to the Triggers tab and create an alert or schedule trigger. 

To run an action plan immediately to test it, do these steps:

1. Go to Control → Action plans
2. Select the action plan 
3. On the Actions panel, click the Run action plan button  

Abiquo recommends that you run an action plan manually to test it before you create a trigger to run it automatically

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

To run your action plan based on metrics, select an existing alert with these steps:

1. Go to Control → Action plans
2. Select an action plan
3. Below the Alerts panel, click the + add button
4. Select an alert. For details about creating an alert, see Manage Alerts

To run your action plan automatically at selected dates and times, create a schedule trigger with these steps:

1. Go to Control → Action plans
2. Select an action plan
3. Below the Schedules panel, click the + add button
4. Enter the details of the schedule using the calendar or time and repeat interval.
   
   For more details see GUI Edit action plan Schedules