Cloud Platform

Using Stack Metrics to monitor activity on your environments

This feature is available to Cloud Platform, Cloud Platform Enterprise, and Site Factory subscribers.

The Cloud Platform Stack Metrics feature provides real-time and historical information about an application’s performance, health, and resource use.

Certain Stack Metrics graphs, such as CPU and Memory, are designed to show the average reported value over a given period to prevent transient spikes in utilization from inaccurately skewing data points. As a result, infrastructure may be utilizing higher CPU/memory than shown on the graphs for short periods of time. While short-lived spikes usually do not impact application performance, prolonged or frequent spikes can, and if sustained, these spikes will appear in your graphs.

Stack Metrics graphs may differ slightly from those provided by Acquia for diagnostic purposes as a result of differing granularity on our internal monitoring services.

To use Stack Metrics:

  1. Sign in to the Cloud Platform user interface.

  2. Select your application and environment.

  3. In the left menu, click Stack Metrics.

You can also use the list preceding the metrics charts to select a time period to review. Select a time span from the last hour to the last 6 months, or set a Custom Range. Clicking a new timeframe in the list refreshes the charts based on your selection.

For environments running on Acquia’s Cloud Classic infrastructure, these metrics reflect all activity on that environment’s infrastructure. For environments running on Cloud Next technologies, metrics for the load balancer layer reflect all activity on that infrastructure, while all other metrics reflect activity only on that environment.

Increasing your environment’s cloud resources

For environments running on Acquia’s Cloud Platform Professional product, you can increase the cloud resources allocated to your application by following the instructions in Managing Cloud Platform infrastructure. Note that changes to your infrastructure capacity in this platform requires approximately 30 minutes of downtime while additional cloud infrastructure is deployed.

For environments running on Acquia’s Cloud Classic infrastructure (Cloud Platform Enterprise or Site Factory), Acquia increases the resources assigned to your application as required to maximize uptime. If you believe that additional resources are required to remediate an issue on your application, create a Support ticket.

For environments running on Cloud Next technologies, additional cloud resources are allocated dynamically to all environments to satisfy demand. On non-production environments, a maximum resource limit of auto-scaling capacity is assigned by default. If you believe additional capacity is required beyond what the system is allocating automatically, create a Support ticket.

Available graphs

You can view information about activity on your application’s cloud infrastructure on the Stack Metrics page. Click the link for detailed information about the graphs for each component as well as for troubleshooting suggestions:

  • Load balancing - Data metrics specific to your environment’s load balancers

  • Application - Data metrics specific to your environment’s application tier (Cloud Classic environments only)

  • Databases - Data metrics specific to your environment’s databases and database infrastructure (Cloud Classic environments only)

  • File system - Data metrics specific to your environment’s file system infrastructure (Cloud Classic environments only)

  • Additional metrics - Additional useful data metrics (Cloud Classic environments only)

  • Cloud Capacity Units - Tracks total resource usage across a variety of functionally diverse cloud services. This feature is in Beta and may not be visible on all applications. (Cloud Next environments only)

Summary graph

In addition to the previous graphs, Cloud Platform Professional customers have a summary graph that gives a view of overall infrastructure health. These statistics include the most recent values for:

  • CPU percentage (%) used

  • Memory percentage (%) used

  • Storage percentage (%) used

Setting a customized time span

To set a customized time span:

  1. Click the time span.

  2. Select a time duration from the left hand menu or choose a custom date range from the calendar.

  3. Click Apply.

Stack Metrics in Cloud Next

Cloud Platform load balancer metrics are still displayed, but application, file system, and database metrics have been temporarily removed; new graphs measuring Cloud Capacity Units utilization over time have been added; CPU graphs will show lower utilization on Cloud Next whenever a site is experiencing no or minimal load.