The Turbonomic Supply Chain

Turbonomic models your environment as a market of buyers and sellers. It discovers different types of entities in your environment via the targets you have added, and then maps these entities to the supply chain to manage the workloads they support. For example, for a hypervisor target, Turbonomic discovers VMs, the hosts and datastores that provide resources to the VMs, and the applications that use VM resources. The entities in your environment form a chain of supply and demand where some entities provide resources while others consume the supplied resources. Turbonomic stitches these entities together.

For information about specific members of the supply chain, see Supply Chain of Entities.

Supply Chain Terminology

IBM introduces specific terms to express IT resources and utilization in terms of supply and demand. These terms are largely intuitive, but you should understand how they relate to the issues and activities that are common for IT management.

Term	Definition
Commodity	The basic building block of Turbonomic supply and demand. All the resources that Turbonomic monitors are commodities. For example, the CPU capacity or memory that a host can provide are commodities. Turbonomic can also represent clusters and segments as commodities. When the user interface shows commodities, it’s showing the resources a service provides. When the interface shows commodities bought, it’s showing what that service consumes.
Composed Of	The resources or commodities that make up the given service. For example, in the user interface you might see that a certain VM is composed of commodities such as one or more physical CPUs, an Ethernet interface, and physical memory. Contrast Composed Of with Consumes, where consumption refers to the commodities the VM has bought. Also contrast Composed Of with the commodities a service offers for sale. A host might include four CPUs in its composition, but it offers CPU Cycles as a single commodity.
Consumes	The services and commodities a service has bought. A service consumes other commodities. For example, a VM consumes the commodities offered by a host, and an application consumes commodities from one or more VMs. In the user interface you can explore the services that provide the commodities the current service consumes.
Entity	A buyer or seller in the market. For example, a VM or a datastore is an entity.
Environment	The totality of data center, network, host, storage, VM, and application resources that you are monitoring.
Inventory	The list of all entities in your environment.
Risk Index	A measure of the risk to Quality of Service (QoS) that a consumer will experience. The higher the Risk Index on a provider, the more risk to QoS for any consumer of that provider’s services. For example, a host provides resources to one or more VMs. The higher the Risk Index on the provider, the more likely that the VMs will experience QoS degradation. In most cases, for optimal operation the Risk Index on a provider should not go into double digits.