Application Auto Scaling now offers better visibility into scaling decisions

Application Auto Scaling now offers customers more visibility about the scaling decisions it takes for an auto scaled resource. Application Auto Scaling (AAS) is a service that offers standardized experience across 13 different AWS services beyond Amazon EC2, for example Amazon DynamoDB provisioned read and write capacity, and Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) services. Application Auto Scaling takes scaling actions based on the customer-defined scaling policies that act as a guideline for scaling decisions. Until now, customers only got details about successful and not about deferred scaling actions. With this feature, customers get more insights about scaling decisions that do not lead to a scaling action in both descriptive and machine-readable format.

The feature is primarily useful for customers to understand why a scaling action is not triggered. Sometimes, the scaling policy may decide not to take a scaling action, giving the impression that it hasn’t followed the customer guideline. However, this is done to safeguard customers or because of some configurations that customers need to change. For example, AAS always respects the minimum and maximum capacity range defined by the customers which could be blocking a scaling action. Until now, customers didn’t have enough visibility around such decisions taken by AAS. Often, customers had to raise support tickets to understand the issue, delaying the possible remediation.

The feature is available in all public and AWS GovCloud (US) Regions. To learn more, refer Application Auto Scaling documentation.