IBM Turbonomic Glossary

An AWS Access Key is a credential that an AWS account root user or IAM user uses to sign programmatic requests to the AWS environment. When configuring AWS targets in Turbonomic, you can provide an access key for the target authentication.

For more information about AWS Access Keys, see https://docs.aws.amazon.com/IAM/latest/UserGuide/id_credentials_access-keys.html

Formerly "On Generation" (see Action Mode)

An Action Execution Schedule is a policy setting which determines when Turbonomic can execute specific generated actions. You can use it to defer the execution of generated actions to a non-critical time window.

For example, if mission-critical VMs experience memory bottlenecks during the week, you can defer the necessary memory resizes to the weekend. Even if the VMs have minimal utilization over the weekend, Turbonomic will recognize the need to resize, and execute the resize actions. Do not confuse Action Execution Schedule with Policy Schedule. (For more about the difference, see Policy Schedule.)

Action Mode is a policy setting that specifies the degree of automation for the actions that Turbonomic generates.

An action mode can direct Turbonomic to execute actions automatically, or only post them so you can do a review and decide which ones are safe to execute. See also Recommend (Action Mode), Manual (Action Mode), and Automated (Action Mode).

The Action Orchestrator is a component of the Turbonomic platform that tracks, translates, and starts the execution of actions in both the live and Plan markets. 

It also provides statistics about actions and action severity.

Active Directory (AD) is a directory service developed by Microsoft for Windows domain networks. It authenticates and authorizes all users and computers in a Windows domain type network. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Directory) 

Turbonomic integrates AD servers and domains to authenticate AD users and groups, and assign them user roles.

 An Affinity Rule is a rule affecting placement of virtual machines on a host. You can implement affinity rules in Turbonomic via placement policies. Also, Turbonomic discovers vSphere Host DRS (Distributed Resource Scheduler) rules when DRS is enabled, and implements them as placement policies. Imported rules are enabled by default, but you can disable specific rules as necessary.

Turbonomic supports Place, Don’t Place, Merge, and License policies. The Place and Don’t Place policies implement Affinity and Anti-affinity rules, respectively. Affinity rules place groups of workloads together on specific hosts so you can easily audit the usage of those workloads. Anti-affinity rules keep specific workloads from running together on the same host to support HA and prevent a single point of failure at that host.

An Agent is a computer program installed  on a node or server to monitor the processes in the background. In most cases, Turbonomic monitors your environment without agents. It uses target APIs to discover applications, platforms, and infrastructure in your environment.

To monitor Kubernetes clusters, Turbonomic uses the Kubeturbo agent. When you install Kubeturbo on a node, it automatically registers itself as a target for the complete Cluster.

• High Percentile – Less aggressive, recommended for critical workloads that need maximum guaranteed performance at all times.
• Default Percentile – The recommended setting to achieve maximum performance and savings.
• Low Percentile – The most aggressive, recommended for non-production workloads that can stand higher resource utilization.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a public Cloud platform that provides compute, storage, and application services.

Turbonomic can manage AWS targets in your environment. Turbonomic is an AWS Partner Network Partner with Cloud Management Tools Competency status.

Ansible is an IT automation engine for cloud provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, intra-service orchestration and more. Based on YAML, it uses no agents or additional custom security infrastructure. Turbonomic uses Ansible Inventory and Play Books to discover VM configuration data and to build application topologies.

See Affinity Rule

An API  is a specification of supported interactions with a software component or resource. APIs make components reusable, and public APIs enable you to tap into functionality developed elsewhere over the web.

Turbonomic uses target APIs to discover applications, platforms, and infrastructure in your environment. The Turbonomic REST API exposes Turbonomic data and processing to remote access via HTTP.

Turbonomic documentation includes a REST API Guide to help you script interactions with the Turbonomic software and develop integrations between Turbonomic and other software applications. 

See also REST

AppDynamics is an Application Performance Management (APM) tool that  provides code-level visibility for on-prem and cloud applications. When you configure AppDynamics targets, Turbonomic provides a full-stack view of your environment, from application to physical hardware.

Turbonomic supports discovery of applications that are managed by AppDynamics, and can make  recommendations and take actions to both assure performance and drive efficiency with the full knowledge of the demands of each individual application experience.

An Application is a program or group of programs designed to perform specific processing for end users. The end users can be human or machine.

An application can be deployed as a single process running on a single host, or as a distributed set of processes running on one or more hosts. For distributed applications the Turbonomic Supply Chain can include a Business Application entity, with underlying Business Transaction, Service, and Application Component entities. The application is ultimately hosted on one or more VMs or Containers.

An Application Component is a software component, application code, or a unit of processing that consumes resources to enable it to perform its function for the Business Application. Examples of resources include memory or CPU.

Turbonomic can recommend actions to adjust the amount of resources available to Application Components.

Application Insights is an Application Performance Management (APM) target type that Turbonomic supports for Microsoft Azure environments.

According to the Microsoft Azure documentation, “Application Insights, a feature of Azure Monitor, is an extensible Application Performance Management (APM) service for developers and DevOps professionals.” (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-monitor/app/app-insights-overview -- “What is Application Insights?“)

Turbonomic supports workload management of the application infrastructure monitored by Application Insights, and provides a full-stack view of the infrastructure, from application to hosting server.

APM is the monitoring and management of performance and availability of software applications. APM strives to detect and diagnose complex application performance problems to maintain an expected level of service. (Dragich, Larry (4 April 2012). “The Anatomy of APM – 4 Foundational Elements to a Successful Strategy”. APM Digest.)

When Turbonomic discovers Business Applications and provides visibility into the full application stack. Turbonomic supports targets from such leading vendors as Dynatrace, New Relic, and AppInsights.

Application Resource Management (ARM) is a top-down, application-driven approach that continuously analyzes applications’ resource needs and generates fully automatable actions to ensure applications always get what they need to perform.

ARM is the Turbonomic mission to simultaneously optimize performance, compliance, and cost of your applications and infrastructure in real time. Turbonomic manages the complete application stack, automatically. Applications are continually resourced to perform while satisfying business constraints. APM runs 24/7/365 and scales with the largest, most complex environments.

ArangoDB is a graph database that runs in the Repository component of Turbonomic.

ArangoDB is a free and open-source native multi-modal database system. It natively works with graphs, documents, and full-text search in one database.

See also Repository.

Automated is an Action Mode that directs Turbonomic to automatically execute the actions that it generates.

Executed actions appear in the All Actions chart.

An Availability Set is a logical grouping in Microsoft Azure that isolates VM resources from each other to limit the impact of failure.  

Microsoft documentation says that with Availability Sets, “If a hardware or software failure happens, only a subset of your VMs are impacted.”
(Tutorial: Create and deploy highly available virtual machines with Azure PowerShell )

Turbonomic discovers Azure Availability Sets. For each set, it creates a policy that identifies compute tiers to exclude from that set.

Azure is a public Cloud platform created by Microsoft that provides compute, storage, and application services.

Turbonomic can manage Azure targets in your environment. Turbonomic holds Co-Sell Ready status in the  Microsoft One Commercial Partner program for its expertise in Azure.