Advanced How-To Guides on Webscale Product Documentation

How to Customize Webscale's Autoscaling

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Webscale autoscaling has a diversity of rulesets used to scale dynamically. Webscale monitors the following metrics on each of the application servers and then uses the returned value in combination with a manually defined value over time to decide if and when to scale the cluster in/out:

CPU % Utilization
I/O Wait %
Kilobytes/second
Load Average
Memory Usage %
Requests/Second

Some examples of autoscaling triggers are “Scale out when Load Average of the system has been greater than 1.25 for 1 minute”, or conversely, “Scale in when Load Average of the system has been less than 0.50 for 1 minute”.

Webscale CLI Reference Guide

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The webscale-cli command is the Swiss army knife of Webscale commands. Use it to fix permissions, restart servers, check the health of the cluster, and many other things.

Note:

The command usage is: sudo webscale-cli <some-command>

Some of the most common uses of this command are to check server health, gather information about clusters, or fix permissions on the filesystem. Note that you must use sudo with this command, or it fails.

Managed Deployments

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Managed deployments allow for new cluster configurations to be deployed systematically and efficiently following the blue-green release model. Deployment configurations are grouped in the UI in reverse chronological order so users can easily see their deployment configuration history as well as the state of their current deployment.

Enabling Managed Deployments

Note:

Managed deployments are an optional feature that must be enabled per account through an entitlement. Contact Webscale Support if you do not have access to this feature and would like it.

Working with Microsites

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

A microsite is a standalone website that displays for your application. A microsite package file (also known as a microsite file) contains the content files for one or more microsites. At a minimum, each microsite will consist of a single html file.

Additionally, a microsite can include assets, such as images or CSS files and files for additional pages. The Files page enables you to upload and work with microsite package files. After you have uploaded microsite files for your account, they are available for all account applications.

Configuring Trusted Proxies

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The Trusted Proxies feature enables you to designate proxy IP addresses for providers that you trust. You can add trusted proxies through the Webscale Control Panel. To use this feature, select address sets with provider IP addresses and choose to enable it.

Trusted proxies can add the X-Forwarded-For header to HTTP requests that they send to your Webscale applications. When Webscale receives a message from a trusted proxy, it will use the encoded client IP address as the request address.

Logs on Webscale

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Log files are plain text files with messages written to them by a server’s operating system and other installed software. These messages help explain the current state of the system and trace any changes made to the system. For instance, error logs contain any error messages the system has encountered, while access logs contain information about when specific files or programs were accessed.

The logs maintained by Webscale include:

Audit logs
Server access logs
Web server access and error logs
Custom logs (Magento, Wordpress, WooCommerce, etc)
MySQL logs (if applicable)
Event logs
Content Security Policy logs
Logs for all services that make up the operating system

In some Webscale environments, your application will send its logs to a data server. Once these logs are sent they are retained on that data server, and this is the central log server for your entire environment.

Configuring and Flushing the Site Cache

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

If you have enabled the Dynamic Site Cache feature, Webscale caches static web pages and resources, such as media assets, scripts, and API responses, according to rules that define how and when your application servers cache content. If the Site Cache contains the content, Webscale directly delivers cached pages and resources to site users, bypassing your web servers.

You can configure Site Cache rules so Webscale only caches content that can be served to any site user and the resources have a low Time-to-Live (TTL) value. Webscale automatically removes cookies from responses that it sends from the cache.

Configuring and Viewing Custom Logs

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Webscale has developed a log monitoring agent called the Webscale Monitoring Agent (WMA) that can be configured to send application or any application related logs (referred to as Custom Logs) to the Webscale Traffic Viewer and the Webscale Logs Viewer for viewing, debugging, and troubleshooting.

The WMA logging service can be configured through the Cluster blueprint editor for both VM and Kubernetes based cluster deployments.

The WMA will monitor specified files for write events and will send the contents of those logs to Webscale. These logs can then be filtered and viewed in the Webscale Control Panel via the Traffic Viewer and Logs Viewer.

Configuring Rate Limiting

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Rate limiting enables you to control access to a page on your website, using Web Controls. For rate limiting, the configuration of Web Controls creates varying experiences for site visitors depending upon criteria that you specify.

Web Controls enable you to use pre-defined security and performance rule sets. Rule sets minimize the need to discover, define, and maintain a large number of individual rules. Instead, you can create rule sets that match individual request or response conditions and execute a set of actions predefined in the Webscale Control Panel. Based on the conditions, Web Controls automatically execute a set of pre-defined actions after all conditions are met. Through Web Controls, you can create complex sequences of actions.

Working with Monitors

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The monitoring feature enables Webscale to track potential problems or system changes. Monitors generate events when they detect activity that matches or exceeds conditions that you define. They can send email notifications when these events occur.

For example, you can create monitors that notify you about website security violations or when the data transfer for outbound traffic exceeds a threshold.

The monitor type determines the activities that monitors can track.

How to View Webscale Application Server Information

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The Webscale Control Panel displays application server information and status. In the control panel you can find out how many servers are currently active, what are those servers’ IPs, if any additional servers are being scaled, and more.

View Application Server Information


	From the Webscale Control Panel’s main page (called the Dashboard , each application section shows the following: Server status and uptime Scaling for the last 24 hours The number of servers
	Click the Zoom button to see more details for the specific application.
	On the application page, the Application Diagram section shows the currently active servers, as well as any servers currently scaling in or out. A list of the IP address for each server is below the server icon. Hover your mouse over the server icon for additional info.
	The Performance section shows the following for the timeframe you have selected: Response time in seconds Responses per second Server count Data transfer in megabytes
	The Events section shows a running log of all events, including scaling in and scaling out events. Click the Zoom button for more details and calendar options.

Advanced How-To Guides on Webscale Product Documentation

How to Customize Webscale's Autoscaling

Webscale CLI Reference Guide

Managed Deployments

Enabling Managed Deployments

Working with Microsites

Configuring Trusted Proxies

Logs on Webscale

The logs maintained by Webscale include:

Configuring and Flushing the Site Cache

Configuring and Viewing Custom Logs

Configuring Rate Limiting

Working with Monitors

How to View Webscale Application Server Information

View Application Server Information

Further Reading