Automation Policies

An automation policy is a set of rules that Turbonomic must satisfy when executing non-parking actions on public cloud or on-prem workloads, or changing settings that affect analysis and action generation.

Automation policies include the following settings:

  • Scope

    The scope determines which entities this policy affects.

  • Policy Schedule

    This setting enables the overall policy at the scheduled time.

  • Automation Workflow

    These settings specify whether Turbonomic or a workflow orchestrator will execute the action. For more information, see Automation Workflow.

  • Constraints and other settings

    These settings affect the Turbonomic analysis of the state of your environment. These include operational, utilization, and scaling constraints.

    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.

Default and User-defined Automation Policies

Turbonomic ships with default automation policies that are believed to give you the best results based on our analysis. For certain entities in your environment, you can create automation policies as a way to override the defaults.

For example, Enforce Non Disruptive Mode is turned off in the default automation policy for on-prem VMs. In most cases, you might want to turn on the setting, and only turn it off for select VMs. In that case, you would turn it on in the default automation policy for VMs, and then create policies for those groups of VMs for which you want to turn it off.

The default and user-defined automation policies take effect in relation to each other. A default policy has a global effect, while a user-defined policy overrides the default policy for the entities within the indicated scope. You should keep the following points in mind:

  • User-defined policies override a subset of settings.

    A user-defined policy can override a subset of settings for the entity type. For the remainder, Turbonomic will use the default policy settings on the indicated scope.

  • When an entity applies conflicting user-defined policies, Turbonomic applies the following tie breakers:

    • A scheduled policy always takes precedence over a non-scheduled policy, even if the non-scheduled policy is more conservative.

    • Among scheduled policies with identical schedules, the most conservative setting wins.

    • Among non-scheduled policies, the most conservative setting wins.

    For example, a VM currently belongs to four groups with different policy settings.

    • Group A policy: Resize VM in Manual mode every Saturday.

    • Group B policy: Resize VM in Automatic mode every Saturday.

    • Group C policy: Resize VM in Manual mode (no schedule).

    • Group D policy: Resize VM in Recommend mode (no schedule).

    Results:

    • On a Saturday, Groups A and B policies take precedence over Groups C and D policies. The VM ultimately applies the Group A setting because it is more conservative.

    • On all the other days, only Groups C and D policies are active. The VM applies the Group D setting because it is more conservative.

  • User-defined policies always take precedence over default policies.

    Even if the default policy has a more conservative setting, the setting in the user-defined policy wins for entities in that scope.

  • For a global effect, always use default policies.