AWS ECS CPU utilization reduction troubleshooting tips from Bobcares

As a part of our AWS Support Service, our Support Teams offer solutions to every query that comes our way.

Let’s take a look at how our skilled Support Techs reduced high CPU utilization.

How to resolve high AWS ECS CPU utilization

Are you looking for a way to troubleshoot high CPU utilization on your ECS task on AWS? Well. You have come to the right place. Our Support Team resolved a similar issue for a long-term customer.

1. First, we will use the Amazon CloudWatch metric to track service-level CPU usage.
2. Then, we will verify if there is any ongoing ECS deployment. In fact, more tasks tend to run and aggregate CPU usage during an ECS deployment. Once the deployment is over, the overall CPU utilization will decrease.

However, if there is no ongoing ECS deployment, we will check the following as well:

• Verify the application logs to check if tasks are performing CPU-intensive operations. We would like to remind you that the logs are exported to different destinations, depending on the logging driver.

  In case you are using awslogs driver, you will find the logs in CloudWatch.
• Also, check whether there is an increase in incoming traffic towards the ECS service. We will check this by scanning the CloudWatch metrics of the load balancer.

  In case there is an increase in traffic, we will increase the desired number of running tasks via Auto Scaling. Thereby, the incoming traffic will be distributed to more tasks, lowering the over CPU usage of the tasks.

How to resolve high AWS ECS CPU utilization for standalone Fargate tasks

We will enable CloudWatch Container Insights to view task-level metrics via performance logs.

Furthermore, we can upgrade to a larger task size to allow the application’s container to perform CPU-intensive workloads.

[Need a hand with Server Management? We are here to help.]

Conclusion

In short, we learned how to reduce high CPU utilization on the Amazon ECS tasks on AWS from the skilled Support Techs at Bobcares.