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Description

Identify Amazon EC2 instances operating at high utilization levels that may be overburdened and require scaling or resizing to maintain optimal performance. Overutilized instances exhibit average CPU and memory utilization above 80% with frequent CPU spikes above 95%. These criteria help pinpoint instances at risk of impacting workloads due to resource exhaustion.

Rationale​

Overutilized EC2 instances often struggle to meet workload demands, leading to degraded application performance and potential downtime. Addressing overutilized instances ensures workloads remain responsive and scalable under peak demands. Remediation actions such as vertical or horizontal scaling enable improved performance and align resources with operational requirements, reducing the risk of performance bottlenecks.

Impact​

Scaling or resizing incurs additional costs. Implementing scaling strategies allows workloads to adapt dynamically to demand changes.

Audit​

This policy evaluates an AWS EC2 Instance over the last 14 days using CPU and memory metrics.

Memory is evaluated in this order:

  • If New Relic Host is present, use New Relic Host: Memory Used, 14-Day.
  • Otherwise, use CloudWatch (Agent): Memory Used, 14-Day.
  • If that metric is empty, use Nagios: Memory Utilization.
  • If all memory metrics are empty, fall back to CPU only.

The instance is marked as INCOMPLIANT when all of these baseline conditions are true:

  • CloudWatch: CPU, 14-Day is greater than 80%.
  • CloudWatch: CPU Max, 14-Day is greater than 95%.

And one of these metric paths applies if present:

  • New Relic Host is present and New Relic Host: Memory Used, 14-Day is greater than 80%.
  • CloudWatch (Agent): Memory Used, 14-Day is greater than 80%.
  • Nagios: Memory Utilization is greater than 80%.

The instance is marked as INAPPLICABLE if it is not currently running or has been running for less than 14 days.

The instance is marked as UNDETERMINED if either required CPU metric is empty, or if New Relic Host is present but New Relic Host: Memory Used, 14-Day is empty.