Creating Automation Policies

To override the default automation policies, you can create your own policies. These policies specify the settings you want to change for certain entities in your environment. You can assign a schedule to your policy to set up maintenance windows or other scheduled actions in your environment.

Below are some use cases for creating automation policies.

  • Turbonomic uses a number of settings to guide its analysis of the entities in your environment. The default settings might be fine in most cases, but you might want different analysis for some groups of entities.

  • Assume you want to automate scaling and placement actions for the VMs in your environment. It is common to take a cautious approach, and start by automating clusters that are not critical or in production. You can scope the policy to those clusters, and set the action acceptance mode to Automatic for different actions on those VMs (see Action Acceptance Modes).

  • If actions require change approval, or integrations into DevOps pipelines to perform tasks before, instead of, or after action execution, you should scope those entities to a group and apply an automation policy.

1. Entry Point

Navigate to the Settings Page and then choose Policies.

Policies button

This opens the Policy Management Page, which lists all the currently available policies.

Policy Management Page

Click NEW POLICY > Automation Policyand then select the entity type (such as Virtual Machine).

This sets the type of entity that your policy will affect. Note that Turbonomic supports different actions for different types of entities. For example, you cannot add VMem to a storage device. Setting policy type is the first step you take to focus on which actions you want to map to your workflows.

2. Policy Name

Name the policy.

Policy name

3. Scope

Policy scope

The scope determines which entities this policy will affect. Choose one or more groups, or create new groups and add them to the policy scope. These groups match the type of entity you have set for the policy.

In Turbonomic you can find nested groups (groups of groups). For example, the "By PM Cluster" group contains host clusters, and each host cluster is a group. Do not set the policy scope to a parent of nested groups. When setting up policies, be sure you set them to individual groups. If necessary, create a custom group for the settings you want to apply.

Note:

A single entity can be a member of multiple groups. This can result in a conflict of settings, where the same entity can have different policy settings. For conflicts among user-defined policy settings, the most conservative setting will take effect. For details, see Default and User-defined Policies.

4. Policy Schedule

Policy Schedule

For use cases and information about how schedules affect policies, see Policy Schedules.

The Select Schedule fly-out lists all the schedules that are currently defined for your instance of Turbonomic.

Expand a schedule entry to see its details. The details include a summary of the schedule definition, as well as:

  • Used in Policies

    The number of policies that use this schedule. Click the number to review the policies.

  • Next Occurrence

    When the schedule will next come into effect.

  • Accepted Actions

    How many scheduled actions have been accepted to be executed in the next schedule occurrence. Click the number for a list of these actions.

  • Awaiting Acceptance

    The number of Manual actions affected by this schedule that are in the Pending Actions list, and have not been accepted. Click the number for a list of these actions.

If none of the listed schedules is suitable for your policy (or if none exists), click New Schedule. For details, see Managing Calendar Schedules.

Note:

When you configure a schedule window for a VM resize action, to ensure Turbonomic will execute the action during the scheduled time, you must turn off the Enforce Non Disruptive Mode setting for that scheduled policy. Even if you turn the setting off for the global policy, you still must turn the setting off for your scheduled policy. Otherwise Turbonomic will not execute the resize action.

5. Automation Workflow

You can define automation workflow settings for different action types within the same policy. For example, for a group of VMs in a policy, you can automate all Resize actions, but require Suspend actions to go through an approval process via an Orchestrator (such as ServiceNow).

Policy Automation and Orchestration

5.1. Action Type

See a list of actions that are viable for the policy, and then make your selections.

5.2. Action Generation

  • Do not Generate Actions

    Turbonomic never considers your selected actions in its calculations. For example, if you do not want to generate Resize actions for VMs in the policy, analysis will still drive toward the desired state, but will do so without considering resizes.

  • Generate Actions

    Turbonomic generates your selected actions to address or prevent problems. Choose how you would like the actions to execute on generation, before execution, on execution, or after execution.

    • Recommend Only — Recommend the action so that a user can execute it outside Turbonomic

    • Manual — Recommend the action, and provide the option to execute that action through the Turbonomic user interface

    • Automated - Execute the action automatically.

      For automated resize or move actions on the same entity, Turbonomic waits five minutes between each action to avoid failures associated with trying to execute all actions at once. Any action awaiting execution stays in queue. For example, if a VM has both vCPU and vMem resize actions, Turbonomic could resize vCPU first. After this resize completes, it waits five minutes before resizing vMem.

    • Automated when approved - Execute the action automatically only after they are externally approved. This option is available only after adding a Service Now target.

    If you have an orchestrator target (such as ServiceNow), and that target includes an installation of the Turbonomic Actions application, you can send the action to the orchestrator.

For more information, see Automation Workflow.

5.3. On Generation, Before Execution, On Execution, and After Execution

By default, generated actions execute without the need for orchestration. Turbonomic gives you the ability to set up orchestration to affect the execution of actions.

For more information, see Automation Workflow.

5.4. Execution Schedule

You can defer the execution of generated actions to a non-critical time window. For example, if a workload experiences memory bottlenecks during the week, you can defer the necessary resize to the weekend. Even if the workload has minimal utilization over the weekend, Turbonomic can recognize the need to resize, and will execute the action.

For more information, see Action Execution Schedules.

6. Constraints and Other Settings

Turbonomic collects metrics to drive the analysis that it uses when it calculates actions for your environment. It compares current utilization and demand against allocated capacities for resources, so it can recommend actions that keep your environment in optimal running condition.

Automation policies include constraints and other settings that you can make to adjust the analysis that Turbonomic performs. For example, you can set different levels of overprovisioning for host or VM resources, and Turbonomic will consider that as a factor when deciding on actions.

The settings you can make are different according to the type of entity this policy will affect. Each setting you add to the policy takes precedence over the default value for that setting.

Policy Analysis settings