Overview
Efficient CPU utilization is fundamental to cost-effective infrastructure operations. This scorecard rule helps you identify underutilized servers and optimize your infrastructure spending while maintaining performance standards.
Why CPU utilization matters
Cost optimization: Underutilized servers represent wasted infrastructure spending. By identifying and addressing low CPU utilization, you can reduce costs through rightsizing or consolidation.
Resource planning: Understanding actual CPU usage patterns helps you make informed decisions about capacity planning, scaling strategies, and infrastructure investments.
Performance insights: CPU utilization trends reveal application behavior patterns and can help identify opportunities for performance optimization or workload redistribution.
Environmental impact: Efficient resource utilization reduces your organization's environmental footprint by minimizing unnecessary compute resources.
How this rule works
This rule evaluates the 95th percentile CPU utilization across your infrastructure entities. The 95th percentile measurement ensures that occasional spikes don't skew your efficiency assessment, while still capturing your typical high-utilization periods.
Success criteria: Infrastructure entities pass when their 95th percentile CPU utilization exceeds 80%, indicating efficient resource usage aligned with industry best practices.
Rule definition
This scorecard rule measures infrastructure efficiency by evaluating CPU utilization patterns across your server environment.
Measurement criteria
Metric evaluated: 95th percentile CPU utilization over the measurement period Success threshold: Greater than 80% CPU utilization Evaluation scope: All infrastructure entities in your monitoring environment
Understanding the 80% threshold
The 80% CPU utilization target represents a balance between efficiency and performance reliability:
Industry standard: This threshold aligns with cloud computing best practices for optimal resource utilization Performance buffer: Maintains sufficient headroom for traffic spikes and unexpected load increases Cost efficiency: Ensures you're getting value from your infrastructure investments without over-provisioning
Why 95th percentile matters
Using the 95th percentile provides a realistic view of your typical high-utilization periods while filtering out:
- Brief traffic spikes that don't represent normal operations
- Maintenance windows or anomalous events
- Short-term performance bursts that might skew average calculations
This measurement approach gives you actionable insights into your infrastructure's true efficiency without being misled by outlier events.
Optimization strategies
When your scorecard shows low CPU utilization, these strategies can help improve infrastructure efficiency:
1. Assess underutilized resources
Identify optimization candidates:
- Review entities with consistently low CPU utilization (below 80% at 95th percentile)
- Analyze usage patterns to distinguish between temporary low usage and chronic underutilization
- Prioritize servers with high infrastructure costs and low utilization rates
Understand usage patterns:
- Examine CPU utilization trends over different time periods (daily, weekly, monthly)
- Identify seasonal or cyclical patterns that might explain low utilization
- Correlate CPU usage with business activities and application workloads
2. Implement rightsizing strategies
Vertical scaling optimization:
- Reduce CPU capacity for consistently underutilized servers
- Consider moving to smaller instance types in cloud environments
- Evaluate memory and storage requirements alongside CPU optimization
Horizontal scaling considerations:
- Consolidate workloads from multiple underutilized servers onto fewer, more efficient hosts
- Implement container orchestration to improve resource allocation
- Use auto-scaling groups to dynamically adjust capacity based on demand
3. Workload optimization
Application-level improvements:
- Review application performance to identify inefficient code or processes
- Optimize database queries and API calls that might be causing CPU idle time
- Implement caching strategies to reduce computational overhead
Service consolidation:
- Combine related services on the same infrastructure when appropriate
- Use microservices orchestration to better distribute workloads
- Implement load balancing to ensure even resource utilization across servers
4. Implementation guidance
Setting up effective monitoring:
- Configure comprehensive CPU monitoring across all infrastructure entities
- Set up alerting for consistently low utilization patterns
- Create dashboards to visualize utilization trends and optimization opportunities
- Establish baseline measurements before implementing changes
Cost management integration:
- Integrate CPU utilization metrics into your financial operations processes
- Use New Relic Cloud Cost Intelligence for comprehensive cost optimization insights
- Group infrastructure resources by team or division using workloads for better accountability
Important considerations
Custom evaluation: These guidelines provide a foundation, but every infrastructure environment is unique. Evaluate CPU utilization patterns based on your specific workload characteristics, business requirements, and performance expectations.
Performance vs. efficiency balance: While higher CPU utilization improves cost efficiency, ensure you maintain adequate performance headroom for business-critical applications. Consider peak traffic patterns and growth projections when optimizing utilization.
Continuous improvement: Infrastructure optimization is an ongoing process. Regularly review and adjust your utilization targets as your applications evolve, business needs change, and new technologies become available.
Next steps
After implementing this scorecard rule:
- Establish baseline measurements for your current CPU utilization patterns
- Implement Memory Utilization monitoring to complete your resource efficiency assessment
- Progress to Change Tracking for Level 2 engineering excellence practices
- Explore the complete Engineering Excellence framework for comprehensive optimization guidance