Reclaim Cloud environments are heavily dependent on the amount of resources an account is using, as that directly determines how much users pay for the service. Because of this, resources are carefully monitored so that users aren't caught off guard by a larger than expected bill.
Sometimes, depending on your notification settings, you may receive alerts for high CPU usage. These messages can be confusing, and you may be wondering if you should be concerned. Fortunately, it's easy to take a look to see if the spikes are a one-off thing, or a larger pattern we need to investigate further.
Finding historical CPU usage
In order to find CPU Usage, you'll need to go to your Reclaim Cloud dashboard and then to the affected environment's specific node.
Once in the node, you can click on the Statistics icon shown below.
From here you'll be able to expand the AppServer: Statistics window by dragging it up with your mouse. You'll not only find CPU Usage, but also RAM, Disk, and Network stats. You are also able to adjust the period of time that you want to view statistics for at the top of this window.
Finding live CPU usage
While it can be helpful to look at historic CPU usage to get a sense of spike patterns, it doesn't really give you a specific look at what processes are running that are taking up that CPU. If you're in the middle of a CPU spike, you can run an htop command to see what specifically is resulting in CPU spikes.
If htop is already installed in your environment (it is in many) simply run:
htop
If it is not already installed, you can easily install it via the following command:
yum install htop -y
Once you're able to run the command, you should be able to see processes using the most CPU listed at the top of the window.
If any of the processes look out of place, this would be a good indication that further investigation is needed.
Understanding CPU usage
In the first example, you can see that stats are displayed over the course of one month at 1-hour intervals. When looking at the CPU portion, it's clear that there are a few random CPU spikes throughout the month, which are likely due to periodic increases in traffic, or even backups.
Reclaim Cloud is a powerful environment that is unlikely to run into regular CPU-related issues. Most times, these spikes are nothing to worry about, as they result from normal usage. With these tips, you'll be able to peek behind the curtain to see what's really going on, and likely reassure yourself that all is running smoothly.