To maintain acceptable website performance, Acquia will upsize your website’s infrastructure components to accommodate any anticipated (or unanticipated) needs. Upsizes can be made both proactively upon subscriber request in anticipation of increased loads, or in response to serious performance issues triggering operational monitoring alerts.
Before making changes, Acquia completes an analysis of the anticipated or real-time system performance issues to determine the necessary configuration requirements. In either case, any added system resources are provided for an extra charge, according to the terms of your contract with Acquia.
Planned upsize events
Acquia requests you provide at least one week notification for planned high traffic or load-inducing events. In the case of a planned event, use the following process:
- create a Support ticket.
- Acquia Support will determine the anticipated system resource requirements, and both you, and your Acquia Account Manager coordinate and approve any extra charges. If required, both you and Acquia Support will determine the timeline for the upsize maintenance window.
- Acquia upsizes the appropriate components at the required time.
- After the upsize event completes, if it is safe to do so, Acquia will downsize the components.
Unplanned upsize events
Unanticipated system loads may require Acquia to temporarily increase the amount of system resources to restore acceptable website performance. In these cases, before performing a component upsize, Acquia will try to notify you to coordinate both diagnosis and repair. If repair is unsuccessful, or applications impair critical website performance, Acquia may proactively upsize system resources according to the terms of your Acquia contract.
System evaluations
Acquia monitors and performs system evaluations across the entire infrastructure, including balancers, web servers, file servers, and database servers. When an operational alert occurs, Acquia reviews the infrastructure to determine if the notification is due to infrastructure, or due to the website traffic.
Acquia performs a traffic analysis to try to determine whether the greater levels are normal traffic or a malicious attack. After the analysis is complete, Acquia will notify the customer and advise the recommended actions depending on the results of the analysis:
- Attack: If Acquia observes that the traffic is potentially malicious or related to a suspected attack, Acquia will notify the customer about the perceived nature of the traffic and ensure that the urgency of the situation is communicated. Acquia may also advise the customer to take specific actions including blocking the source of the traffic at a WAF level when possible, or through code/module updates if a WAF is not in place. Acquia may also increase system resources to regain acceptable performance as fast as possible.
- Normal but elevated: Acquia evaluates the system to determine what resources in the configuration can be upsized to effectively handle the traffic.
Acquia diagnoses system dynamics to ensure the most effective resolution. The alerting component may not be the root cause of an issue, and may have generated an alert due to upstream problems.
Website performance issues can result from problematic code generating excess load on the infrastructure. Temporary upsizes can mitigate performance issues while Acquia determines the root cause, and while you repair the issue. Acquia Support will analyze these situations and help determine if website code is the root cause, and if so, perform a temporary upsize.
Emergency upsizing
After a rapid analysis, Acquia will upsize system resources in the least disruptive manner possible. If the website is operational but suffering from poor performance, Acquia will upsize resources while maintaining the website’s operation. If there is an outage, Acquia will upsize resources to return the website to an operational state as fast as possible.
Websites not using Acquia’s high availability architecture will experience downtime when upsizing some resources.
Subscriber notifications
After Acquia performs a preliminary evaluation based on an operational alert, Acquia Support will create a proactive Critical Support ticket to notify subscribers. Depending on the severity and urgency of the issue, Acquia may take the following steps:
- Coordinate with the subscriber on required actions, including obtaining permission to upsize whenever possible.
- Take unilateral action to ensure website availability within contractual terms.
Acquia’s actions to ensure website stability will be documented in the ticket, which also notifies your Account Manager. Acquia will then coordinate with you to analyze and perform infrastructure downsizes when it is safe and appropriate.
Acquia Support will diagnose performance issues based on the scope of Support services and, where possible, make optimization recommendations for both current and future needs. You are responsible for implementing any provided recommendations. Acquia Support may also recommend engaging Acquia Professional Services or third-party resources for deeper analysis or for the repair of highly complex problems.