Manage action plans and triggers

Action plans and triggers

To enable cloud users more control over cloud operations, Abiquo supports virtual machine action plans to run tasks for virtual machines (and Docker workloads). Virtual machine action plans are for both private and public cloud and are an important autoscaling functionality on the platform. Each virtual machine can have zero or more action plans.

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

Create an action plan

Before you create an action plan, first create a virtual machine.

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
   
   1. To add an action, click the + button
   2. Select the action type from the pulldown list
   3. Enter parameters as required

• Put the actions in order using the arrow buttons
• Delete actions as required using the trash can button

Notes:

• The order of actions is important
• Abiquo constraints apply, for example, to create an instance, the VM must be deployed and powered off. 
• Hypervisor constraints apply, for example, when using hot reconfigure on ESXi, you cannot decrement CPU or RAM 
• For some actions you must enter parameters

Run an action plan now

When you have added some actions and saved the action plan, you can run the action plan immediately.

To do this, edit the action plan and click the Execute action plan button, which is beside the + add button to create a new action. 

This can help you to test the action plan before you create a schedule to run it automatically.

Abiquo will create events when actions are performed.

Create a trigger

Abiquo supports two types of triggers to run action plans: alerts and schedules.

Select an alert trigger

You can select an existing virtual appliance alert to trigger an Action plan.

For details about creating an alert, see Manage Monitoring Alerts

Create a schedule trigger

To run your action plan automatically, create a task schedule, for either an interval (within an optional timeframe) or using a calendar with Cron.

To create a task schedule go to the Task schedules tab at either the Control tab level, or the Action plan level.

Modify or delete a schedule

If you modify or delete a schedule, Abiquo will update any action plan that is currently run on the schedule.

For convenience, the main Task schedules tab displays all schedules.

Delete an action plan

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