We are happy to announce "phantomize", a Phantom feature that will automatically install and run the tcollector sensor agent on the first boot of your virtual machines thereby automatically instrumenting your VMs to provide sensor measurements.
Phantom offers autoscaling based on sensor measurements from a variety of sources, including user's virtual machines. To collect these measurements, Phantom relies on the tcollector sensor agent being running on each of those virtual machines. Until now, users had to manually install tcollector in their virtual machines or use an image provided by us with tcollector already installed. The former requires extra effort and the latter restricts the user to the types of images provided by us.
The phantomize feature addresses this problem. To use it, all the user needs to do is pick the "phantomize" contextualization type in their launch configuration settings. The only requirement is that the user's virtual machine image is capable of downloading and executing the user-data script on boot.
Phantomize has been tested successfully with Debian, Fedora, and Ubuntu virtual machines on FutureGrid clouds running Nimbus and OpenStack.
