IBM Turbonomic Glossary

The Desired State is the state of your environment that assures application performance while achieving efficient use of resources and complying with business rules and constraints.

Instead of responding after a threshold is crossed, Turbonomic analyzes operating conditions and constantly recommends actions to keep the entire environment within the desired state.

You can measure performance as a function of delay, in which zero delay gives the ideal Quality of Service (QoS) for a given service. You can measure efficiency as a function where 100% utilization of a resource is the ideal. You can plot the relationship between delay and utilization as a curve. Up to a point, as you increase utilization, the increase in delay is slight. There comes a point on the curve where a slight increase in utilization results in an unacceptable increase in delay. On the other hand, there is a point in the curve where a reduction in utilization doesn’t yield a meaningful increase in QoS. The desired state lies within these points on the curve. 

DRS is the VMware vSphere utility that “provides resource management capabilities like load balancing and virtual machine (VM) placement” on a cluster of ESXI hosts. (Understanding vSphere DRS Performance, p.4).

Turbonomic discovers DRS rules in your environment and generates Placement Policies that respect the given constraints.

Dynatrace is a platform that uses artificial intelligence to deliver application performance monitoring (APM), artificial intelligence for operations (AIOps), IT infrastructure monitoring, digital experience management (DEM), and digital business analytics capabilities.

Turbonomic supports discovery of applications that are managed by the Dynatrace platform, 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.

Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) is an easy to use, high performance block storage service designed for use with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) for both throughput and transaction intensive workloads at any scale (Amazon website).

For AWS environments, Turbonomic discovers storage capacity and recognizes whether it is ephemeral “instance” storage or persistent EBS storage. For EBS storage, Turbonomic can recommend and execute storage resize actions.

A Fabric is a service that unites compute, network and storage access into a cohesive system. When you connect Turbonomic to fabric targets, it monitors the performance and resource consumption of the fabric entities to assure application performance while also utilizing resources as efficiently as possible.

Once connected, Turbonomic discovers the blades that host the VMs, the chassis and datastores that provide resources to the blades, the IO modules and fabric interconnects that provide network resources, and the virtual datastores that provide storage resources to the VMs.

As part of this process, Turbonomic stitches information from the fabric target and the associated hypervisor targets together to support Application Resource Management (ARM).  With this support, it provides deeper insight into the state of the hardware, the applications, and the VM’s running on the hypervisor-stitched blades. Combined with other targets, this information supports a top-down, application-driven approach to managing your environment.

Flow0 -- InProvider Flow is a measurement of network flow within a single provider, e.g.,, the network flow between VMs that are hosted by the same physical machine. This measures network flow between consumers that are on the same set of closely connected providers. Charts show the percentage of capacity that is utilized. 

Note that Turbonomic assumes an unlimited supply of InProvider Flow because this flow does not go across the physical network

(6.4 version family only)

Flow1-- InDPOD Flow is a measurement of network flow that is local to the given DPOD. This measures network flow between consumers that are on the same set of closely connected providers. Charts show the percentage of capacity that is utilized.

(6.4 version family only)

Flow2 -- CrossDPOD Flow is a measurement of network flow that is between different DPODs. This measures network flow between consumers that are on different sets of closely connected providers. Charts show the percentage of capacity that is utilized.

(6.4 version family only)

See Wasted Storage

Grafana is an analytics platform for creating and sharing dashboards to visualize and understand metrics.

The Turbonomic Embedded Reports feature uses Grafana to display its data in dashboards.