Appliance Load

The Appliance Load pane displays an estimate of the load level of the appliance based on metrics such as CPU, Swap Usage, Bandwidth, memory usage, and the number of users logged into the appliance. For more information, see the Appliances Pane.

The dial for each appliance displays an estimate of how busy the appliance is:

• Green indicates that the appliance is not very busy.
• Yellow is a warning that the appliance is starting to get busy.
• Red indicates that the appliance is busy or has a 100% load; the user experience may degrade.
• Gray indicates that the appliance cannot be reached.

The Appliance load for an appliance is determined by its “load score”.

The primary factor in "load score" is distance to the appliance, the closest appliance taking the highest priority. Distance being equal, appliance "load score" is used to determine the appliance that will likely have the best user experience.

• The load score is a combined metric computed from several usage and performance factors (such as CPU, network, and memory) that affect the performance of an appliance, weighted based on their known impact on the remote access experience of connecting users. For example, high CPU usage does not have a major impact on the Load Score for an appliance, but high network bandwidth usage is more highly weighted when the load score for an appliance is calculated.
• When calculating the load score, the differences in the capabilities of the different SMA appliance models in your CMS cluster are taken into account. For example, an SMA 6200 (rated at 2,000 users) with 200 users is expected will show a higher load score than an SMA 7200 (rated at 10,000 users) with 2000 users.
• The impact of different resources is normalized when calculating the load score. For example, users using a significant amount of CPU resources on one appliance will have less impact on the load score than users using excessive bandwidth on another appliance.
• The load score is used by Global High Availability (HA) to determine the preferred appliance toward which user connections and traffic should be routed. For example, if two appliances are located in the same data center or geographic area, Global HA will prioritize the appliance that has the lower load score.