Policies

Policies perform the active management enabled by Brooklyn.
They can subscribe to entity sensors and be triggered by them or they can run periodically.

Policies can add subscriptions to sensors on any entity. Normally a policy will subscribe to its related entity, to the child entities, and/or those entities which are members.

When a policy runs it can:

  • perform calculations,
  • look up other values,
  • invoke efectors (management policies) or,
  • cause the entity associated with the policy to emit sensor values (enricher policies).

Entities can have zero or more Policy instances attached to them.

Writing Policies

Sample Policy

This section is not complete. Feel free to fork the docs and lend a hand.

Best Practice

The following recommendations should be considered when designing policies:

Management should take place as "low" as possible in the hierarchy

  • place management responsibility in policies at the entity, as much as possible ideally management should take run as a policy on the relevant entity

  • place escalated management responsibility at the parent entity. Where this is impractical, perhaps because two aspects of an entity are best handled in two different places, ensure that the separation of responsibilities is documented and there is a group membership relationship between secondary/aspect managers.

Policies should be small and composable

e.g. one policy which takes a sensor and emits a different, enriched sensor, and a second policy which responds to the enriched sensor of the first (e.g. a policy detects a process is maxed out and emits a TOO_HOT sensor; a second policy responds to this by scaling up the VM where it is running, requesting more CPU)

Where a policy cannot resolve a situation at an entity, the issue should be escalated to a manager with a compatible policy.

Typically escalation will go to the entity parent, and then cascade up. e.g. if the earlier VM CPU cannot be increased, the TOO_HOT event may go to the parent, a cluster entity, which attempts to balance. If the cluster cannot balance, then to another policy which attempts to scale out the cluster, and should the cluster be unable to scale, to a third policy which emits TOO_HOT for the cluster.

Management escalation should be carefully designed so that policies are not incompatible

Order policies carefully, and mark sensors as "handled" (or potentially "swallow" them locally), so that subsequent policies and parent entities do not take superfluous (or contradictory) corrective action.

For this release, some of the mechanisms for implementing the above practices are still being developed.

Implementation Classes

This section is not complete. Feel free to fork the docs and lend a hand.

  • extend AbstractPolicy, or override an existing policy

Off-the-Shelf Policies

Policies are highly reusable as their inputs, thresholds and targets are customizable.

Management Policies

  • Resizer Policy

    Increases or decreases the size of a Resizable entity based on an aggregate sensor value, the current size of the entity, and customized high/low watermarks.

    A Resizer policy can take any sensor as a metric, have its watermarks tuned live, and target any resizable entity - be it an application server managing how many instances it handles, or a tier managing global capacity.

    e.g. if the average request per second across a cluster of Tomcat servers goes over the high watermark, it will resize the cluster to bring the average back to within the watermarks.

Enricher Policies

  • Delta

    Converts absolute sensor values into a delta.

  • Time-weighted Delta

    Converts absolute sensor values into a delta/second.

  • Rolling Mean

    Converts the last N sensor values into a mean.

  • Rolling Time-window Mean

    Converts the last N seconds of sensor values into a weighted mean.

  • Custom Aggregating

    Aggregates multiple sensor values (usually across a tier, esp. a cluster) and performs a supplied aggregation method to them to return an aggregate figure, e.g. sum, mean, median, etc.

Implementing Policies

This section is not yet complete. Feel free to fork the docs and lend a hand.

Please see the class brooklyn.policy.Policy and implementations.