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 that run the 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 actions are executed in order
• The action plan constraints are as follows
  
  • Optional maintenance block
    
    • You can create one complete maintenance block (start maintenance, action(s), and stop maintenance)
    • The maintenance block cannot contain any scaling actions
  • Scale in and/or scale out action
    
    • You can only scale in and/or scale out at the end of the action plan
    • You can create the scaling action(s) in any order (e.g. scale in first, only scale in)
  • Email actions
    
    • You can perform an email action at any time, including after scaling actions
• 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

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 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.

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 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.