6 posts tagged with "automation"

In a previous blog post, I showed how you could use Frame Admin API to monitor Frame accounts that had running instances because of misconfigured account capacity settings. This could lead to spending more on your cloud infrastructure than is needed. In this blog, I will demonstrate how you can use the Frame Admin API to identify and delete user volumes that have not been used in a while. Periodically removing unused volumes can help keep cloud storage costs down and can make sure that your data retention policies are being appropriately followed.

The Frame Education team uses public cloud infrastructure to conduct labs that demonstrate the power and capabilities of Frame. Sometimes during the course of these labs, students change the capacity settings of their Frame lab accounts to have machines running 24x7. Since these machines are in a public cloud, this can cause unnecessary and unexpected cloud expenses. To combat this, I developed a script to check all of the Frame accounts in the Frame Education customer entity and send alerts to a Slack channel if an account has a machine setup to run outside the hours of the Frame Lab. This allows the Frame instructors to identify and shutdown machines running outside of the lab's hours and shut them down. In this blog, I will go over how I used the Frame Admin API to accomplish this.

Nutanix and ServiceNow have built a strong partnership over the years, and the collaboration continues as we look to deliver even more benefits for our mutual customers! One example of this is to see just how easy it is to integrate the Nutanix Frame Desktop-as-a-Service with the ServiceNow workflow solution to easily onboard and provision apps and desktops to new users!

Frame® Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) provides a detailed scheduling capability to ensure that Frame accounts are able to deliver just-in-time production capacity while minimizing the additional cost of having idle cloud capacity. However, Frame does not currently have the built-in feature to alert administrators when an existing production pool is running out of provisioned capacity. This might lead to users not being able to connect to a session because all of the VMs in the production pool are in use at a moment in time. This blog will demonstrate how the Frame Admin API can be used to monitor the actual number of concurrent sessions and send a message to a Slack® channel when the number of active sessions reaches a certain percentage of the provisioned capacity of a Frame production pool.

The Nutanix Frame™ Platform records session and audit log information on what actions users and administrators are doing in the Frame Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS). This session and audit log information is available for download from the Frame Console. Enterprises often want to combine this session and audit event data with information from other sources within their Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) solution in order to obtain a more comprehensive view of what is occurring in their enterprise. In this blog, we will demonstrate how Frame Admin API can be used within a PowerShell script to retrieve audit data from Frame and insert it into the Splunk® event manager, one of the more popular SIEM's on the market.

Cloud-based infrastructure has empowered IT managers with the ability to provide their users with virtually unlimited on-demand compute and storage resources from datacenters across the world. Successful capacity management is key to balancing the cost versus user experience equation. Running and pre-provisioned machines make for quick connections for users, but also consume infrastructure costs by keeping the cloud meter running.