Managing the capacity of your IBM Cloud infrastructure
As a Capacity Planner or IBM Cloud Technology Specialist, you can use BMC Helix Continuous Optimization to configure, administer, and manage the capacity of your IBM Cloud infrastructure.
As the flow diagram illustrates, the data source (IBM Cloud API ETL) collects data from the IBM Cloud Management console. The collected data is transferred to Continuous Optimization where it is processed, and then displayed on the user interface. You can use the product features to review, analyze, and manage the capacity of your IBM Cloud infrastructure.
The following sections describe how you can achieve these goals:
Managing the capacity of IBM Cloud infrastructure
You can analyze and manage the capacity of your IBM Cloud infrastructure elements by using the IBM Virtual Servers view. For the IBM Cloud data to be available in the view, the Administrator must first set up the data sources to collect data.
Task 1. Collect data and install the views
As an Administrator, you can use the IBM-Cloud-IBM-Cloud-API-Extractor-for-Classic-Infrastructure to collect data from the IBM Virtual Servers (VMs):
- Configure and run this ETL to collect the required configuration and performance metrics from the virtual server instances.
- In addition to the required metrics collected by using the IBM Cloud API Extractor, you can provision a virtual server with the Sysdig agent for Linux and Windows respectively, to collect additional performance metrics from them. These metrics are useful for gaining operational visibility into the performance and health of your applications, services, and platforms. The Sysdig agent collects these metrics and sends them to Sysdig instance. When you run the IBM Cloud API ETL, these metrics are imported into the BMC Helix Continuous Optimization database. For more information, see Collecting-additional-metrics-using-the-Sysdig-agent.
(Optional) You can also use BMC-TrueSight-Capacity-Optimization-Gateway-VIS-files-parser to collect additional metrics at a higher granularity. Before you use this ETL, you must instrument the VMs. The memory utilization value that is collected from an instrumented VM is based on the actual memory of the VM. The Agent collects resource consumption breakdown at process or workload level and helps you to detect specific in-guest OS level resource constraints (for example, in-guest paging due to the physical memory configuration of the VM being too low).
BMC recommends that you instrument your business-critical VMs to collect OS-level memory usage values.
To instrument a VM:
- Install a Continuous Optimization Agent inside the VM from which you want to collect metrics
- Configure the Gateway Server and Continuous Optimization Agent to initiate data collection. For more information, see Collecting data via Continuous Optimization Agents.
- Configure and use the out-of-the-box BMC-TrueSight-Capacity-Optimization-Gateway-VIS-files-parser to collect the required metrics from the VM
After data collection starts, data is loaded daily and Indicators are available in the Workspace.
As an Administrator, you must install the IBM Cloud views and Business Services view and grant the necessary permissions to Capacity Planners and IBM Cloud Technology Specialists to access these views. While creating the service pools, ensure to select IBM Cloud domains to view IBM Cloud only data.
Task 2. Analyze the collected data
For detailed analysis of IBM Cloud infrastructure elements, use the IBM-views.
The following common use cases are described here:
Understand the usage and health of your IBM Cloud Virtual Servers
Review and analyze the Virtual-Servers-page-in-the-IBM-Virtual-Servers-view to determine the usage and health of your virtual servers.
From the Instance Name filter, select the instance that you want to view data for detailed analysis.
Determine and analyze the available resources and their utilization per Virtual Server instance
Review and analyze the relevant metrics on the Virtual-Servers-page-in-the-IBM-Virtual-Servers-view to determine the available resources and their utilization per instance. For example, utilization metrics for CPU, Memory, and File Systems.
Performing advanced analysis
The earlier sections explained how you can use the out-of-the-box capacity views to manage your environment. These capacity views help you analyze your IBM Cloud infrastructure using a predefined set of metrics.
To perform advanced analysis on the imported IBM Cloud data, such as identifying specific performance issues, trends, and bottlenecks, you can use Analysis.
Here are some use cases for which you can create and use Analyses:
Analyze the memory usage of IBM Cloud virtual servers
The following video (2:20) illustrates how to analyze the memory usage of IBM Cloud virtual servers using an analysis.
Analyze the resource utilization pattern of IBM Cloud virtual servers
The following video (3:10) illustrates how to analyze the resource utilization pattern of IBM Cloud resources using an analysis.
Managing future demand
By using the capacity views and analysis charts, you can analyze the data of your existing capacity. To predict and plan your IT resource needs, use Models.
Predicting the behavior of your resources
Use Models to predict service performance and obtain forecasts of historical series of metrics, including deep details on the modeling techniques used in forecasts and how to interpret the results of model runs. For more information, see Modeling-capacity-usage.
How to determine when a resource of an IBM Cloud virtual server instance reaches threshold
The following video (3:11) illustrates how to predict the behavior of IBM Cloud resources using models.