Infrastructure groups

Infrastructure instances are grouped together into what are known as ‘Infrastructure groups’. All instances in a single infrastructure group are turned on simultaneously and have the same error handling and wait options applied to them.

Health checking

When an infrastructure instance is started, Lens will automatically identify the type of infrastructure being controlled and will perform health checks on the instance to confirm when it is online. If the infrastructure health checks fail outside of a start/stop operation then Lens will notify administrators that the system is partially online or in a degraded state. The 7fivefive monitoring service also is aware of this and a 7fivefive engineer will be in touch to notify you of the issue and the steps we are taking to rectify it.

Configuration options

Automatically controlled

When this option is enabled, the infrastructure scheduler/Infrastructure Availability Manager will control the infrastructure group on infrastructure start and stop operations.

If this option is disabled, the group can still be started and stopped via the Lens Portal.

Essential

When this option is enabled, Lens will raise alerts in the event that no start/stop operation is running, but an instance in the group has failed the health check. For example, if you have a group for render instances that do not need to be on all the time you would not have these started via the scheduler. However, you may want to know when they fail health checks.

Wait modes

After an infrastructure group has been started, the Lens Portal can wait for a defined period of time until moving on to the next infrastructure group. Lens can also wait until all instances in the group pass their health checks before moving on to the next group. This is the recommended wait mode as it ensures all infrastructure is ready before moving on to other infrastructure that may be dependent on the previous group. The available options are:

• Wait for instances to become healthy

• Do not wait

• Wait for 30 seconds

• Wait for 1 minute

• Wait for 2 minutes

• Wait for 5 minutes

• Wait for 10 minutes

Error handling

When an infrastructure group executes a start or stop operation it monitors for issues during the process. In the event, an issue or error occurs it will perform the error handling action that is defined on the infrastructure group. The available options are:

• Continue on error
  If an error occurs, then Lens will ignore this and continue with the startup or shutdown process.

• Abort startup/shutdown operation on error
  If an error occurs, then Lens will abort the infrastructure stop/start operation on the current infrastructure group. No further action will be taken.

• Shutdown infrastructure on error
  If an error occurs, then Lens will abort the current operation and will shut down the infrastructure.