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Intelligent Autoscaling | Application Performance Monitoring with Avi

Gaurav Rastogi
Posted on Nov 23, 2016 8:22:00 AM

Not very long ago, one of our co-founders wrote a post on the million-dollar question in the enterprise networking world.  In that post, Ranga discussed how hardware load balancers cannot scale elastically, which is why even web-scale companies such as Facebook and Google leverage software load balancers for elastic autoscaling to match traffic requirements. 

In this post, I walk you through the specific metrics your load balancer must monitor for efficient and intelligent autoscaling.  The decision to scale-out or scale-in applications should be made based on the application’s performance, available resources, and saturation in underlying cloud infrastructure.  App scale-out is desired when there is degradation in service quality, available resources, an increase in errors, and in application load.  Conversely, apps must be scaled-in when it is over-provisioned. 

The following metrics represent a cloud application’s performance and capacity:

  1. Application Service Quality (Latency): Latency is the most important indicator of an application’s performance. The backend pool server’s latency is the most obvious metric to monitor. Also, it is also important to monitor network quality experienced by the clients to access the service, i.e., network latency in reaching the service (round-trip-time). An application may be very fast, but clients may experience service degradation due to poor network access.
  2. Application Load: Production applications are typically benchmarked to establish the amount of load they can handle. The specific load metric may be different for different types of applications. For example, transactions-per-second is a reasonable load metric for a database application, whereas network throughput is a better metric for a video streaming server. The most commonly used metrics to measure the load for internet applications are the maximum concurrent open connections, network bandwidth, requests/sec, connections/sec, and SSL sessions/sec.
  3. Resource Utilization: Compute and storage resources are like oxygen for an internet application. All applications require CPU, memory, and disk. Many applications may saturate or slow down even before the CPU or memory has been exhausted. High resource utilization is one of the most common symptoms of an application that is slowing down.

In addition to the standard resource metrics mentioned above, Avi’s Service Engines have additional resources that are used to make intelligent and real-time decisions to scale-out and scale-in. Here is a quick summary of those metrics:

    1. Connection Memory Usage: This is the percentage of memory reserved for handling connections; rest of the memory allocated to a Service Engine is used for HTTP in-memory cache. Scale-out or increasing connection memory percentage is useful when connection memory is low.
    2. Syn Cache Usage: This is particularly useful in applications with significantly higher connections per second.
    3. Persistent Table Usage: This metric should be monitored when persistency settings are used in an application. Scaling up of Service Engines is the only recommended action to increase persistent table memory.
    4. SSL Session Cache Usage: New SSL connections cannot be established when an SSL session cache is full; scaling up of Service Engines is recommended to increase SSL session usage.
    5. Packet Buffer Usage (total, large, small, header): The Service Engines may run out of special memory segments used for receiving and transmitting packets on the network interfaces.
      • In general, scale-out of Service Engines is a preferred course of action when shared resources such as CPU, memory, etc. are saturated. In instances where connection persistence is desired (such as cookie persistence, SSL session cache, etc.) scale-up of service engine is recommended. Scaling out, in other words, additional Service Engines does not help in such scenarios and could further downgrade the performance due to increased communication related to persistency.

    6. Errors - Errors may reflect saturation and the undesired state of an application. It may be required to scale-out when the rate of errors increase. However, an absence of errors does not signify the resources should be scaled-in. Here are some of the useful error metrics to consider for scale-out:
      • Response errors: Applications return errors when they are not able to keep up with the load. For example, an application may fail transactions as they are not able to open new connections to the backend database.  
      • Failed connections: Applications fail to serve up the connections when they get overloaded, instead of gracefully queuing requests. 
      • Denial of Service (DOS) attacks: When applications are under undesired DOS attack, they should be scaled out to have enough capacity to serve legitimate clients.
    7. Availability: A key metric to decide when to scale-out is the operational state and availability of the application resources. If a pool server becomes intermittently unavailable, then a new server should be added to ensure clients do not suffer application outages.

Application Profile

The following sections provide a framework to choose different autoscale metrics for cloud application by identifying application’s performance and resource traits. Admins can match their application to one of the traits below and set up autoscaling.

  • Basic Traits (ALL): Most common resources used by applications are CPU, memory, network, and disk. Also, they may have application-specific resources such as memory buffers, software locks, etc. Applications degrade when any of these resources are low. A best practice is to scale-out when any of these resources (CPU, Memory, or disk) are low and scale-in when there are plenty of resources.
  • High Transactions applications (EX): e-commerce applications, consumer websites, and financial applications (ERP applications, IIS, Websphere, CMS systems like Drupal, Adobe experience Manager, e-commerce websites) are examples of high transaction applications. These applications slow down and have errors when they are close to their operational capacity. Scale-out should be setup based on the application’s maximum load benchmark. A good measure of the load is concurrent open connections as it reflects how busy is the server. Other metrics that represent load are the rate of connections and rate of requests.
  • High throughput applications (BW): The high throughput applications have very high incoming or outgoing bandwidth requirements. Streaming servers, file sharing, and image servers are examples of such applications. For example, a streaming server limited to 10Gbps should be scaled out when throughput reached 9.5 Gbps and scaled in when throughput is less than 2 Gbps.
  • Database applications (DB): Database intensive applications have both high amount of transactions and potentially vast disk I/O. When a database-centric application gets overburdened with traffic, the application typically slows down even before the CPU and memory squeeze occur. They are often setup with an internal configuration that defines their memory and CPU usage.
  • High CPU applications (CX): In general, CPU is used independently of the application type. However, some applications are more CPU intensive than others. For example, any service that involves cryptographic operations like SSL termination, file encryption, graphics modeling, complex science models, simulation, analytics, etc. require a log of CPU. In such applications, just monitoring CPU may be enough to make scale-out and scale-in decisions.

Using Avi HealthScore for Autoscaling

Avi's HealthScore can also be used to decide an application's scale-out as the app health incorporates all the metrics described in the previous section into a single indicative number. Avi’s health score incorporates performance metrics and errors across network and application stacks. It degrades when there is not enough available resources or inconsistent performance. Application health, for an Avi Vantage user, therefore is the simplest way to setup autoscale policy in the absence of a good performance and resource benchmark for that application.

Autoscale Policy Example

Here is an example of how an Avi admin can configure scale-out and scale-in for an enterprise application that has been benchmarked to support 100 open connections at its peak and has an SLA requirement of <500ms latency.

Step 1: Setup Scaleout Alerts

Screen Shot 2016-06-14 at 2.22.25 PM.png

Setup alert configuration with following alert rule as

Scaleout Alert - Pools concurrent connections is greater than 90 or latency is greater than 500ms or CPU is greater than 90% or Memory is greater than 90%.  

Step 2: Configure Scale-in Alerts

Now set up the scale-in alert such that performance is within the SLAs and there are plenty of resources.

Scale-in Alert - Pools concurrent connections are less than 20 and latency is greater than 400ms, and CPU is less than 20%, or Memory is less than 50%.

Step 3: Define Autoscale Policy

Autoscale-policy.png

Select the “scale-out alert” in the list of Alerts to be used for scale-out.

Select the “scale-in alert” in the list of Alerts to be used for scale-in.

Step4: Attach Autoscale Policy to the Pool

Screen Shot 2016-06-14 at 3.12.25 PM.png

Choose the autoscale policy “Enterprise Autoscale Policy” in the Pool configuration.

Appendix - Metric IDs for use in AlertConfig and ServerAutoscale Policy APIs

Type

App Type

Metric

metric_id

Health

 

Health Score

health.health_score_value

Quality

ALL

Application Response Latency

l7_server.avg_resp_latency

 

 

Client Access latency

l7_client.avg_client_data_transfer_time

 

 

Network Latency

l7_client.avg_total_rtt

 

 

Server network latency

l4_server.avg_total_rtt

Load

DB, EX

Pool Open Connections

l4_server.max_open_conns

 

ALL

Per-Server Pool Open Conns

l4_server.avg_pool_open_conns

 

ALL

Pool network connection quality (Apdexc)

l4_server.apdexc

 

DB, EX

Per-server Pool connection rate

l4_server.avg_pool_complete_conns

 

MX

Per-Server Pool Bandwidth

l4_server.avg_pool_bandwidth

 

EX

Per-server new connections

l4_erver.avg_pool_new_established_conns

 

EX

Pool Response Quality (Apdexr)

l4_server.apdexr

 

EX

Request rate

l7_server.avg_complete_responses

 

DB, EX

Per-server response rate

l7_server.avg_pool_complete_responses

Availability

ALL

Pool Uptime

l4_server.avg_uptime

Errors

ALL

Connection Errors

l4_server.pct_connection_errors

 

ALL

Request Errors

l7_server.pct_response_errors

 

ALL

DDOS

l4_client.pct_connections_dos_attacks

 

ALL

Pct DOS packets

l4_client.pct_pkts_dos_attacks

 

ALL

Pct SSL failed connections

l7_client.pct_ssl_failed_connections

Resources

ALL, CX

CPU

vm_stats.avg_cpu_usage

 

ALL

Memory

vm_stats.avg_mem_usage

 

ALL

Disk

vm_stats.avg_disk1_usage, vm_stats.avg_disk2_usage, vm_stats.avg_disk3_usage, vm_stats.avg_disk4_usage

SE - Load Balancer

ALL

SE CPU

se_stats.avg_cpu_usage

 

ALL

SE Memory

se_stats.avg_mem_usage

 

ALL

SE Disk

se_stats.avg_disk1_usage

 

ALL

Syn Cache usage

se_stats.pct_syn_cache_usage

 

ALL

Connection Mem usage

se_stats.avg_connection_mem_usage

 

ALL

Packet Buffer Usage

se_stats.avg_packet_buffer_usage

 

ALL

Large Packets Buffer Usage

se_stats.avg_packet_buffer_large_usage

 

ALL

Small Packets Buffer Usage

se_stats.avg_packet_buffer_small_usage

 

ALL

Header Packets Buffer Usage

se_stats.avg_packet_buffer_header_usage

 

DB, EX

Persistent Table Usage

se_stats.avg_persistent_table_usage

 

SSL

SSL session cache usage

se_stats.avg_ssl_session_cache_usage

 

Scale from 0 to 1 Million TPS with Avi Networks  

Topics: Application Performance Monitoring, autoscale, metrics, Autoscaling, APM

  
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