Question

A payment processing service runs on a Managed Instance Group behind an internal load balancer. Latency spikes occur when the queue of pending transactions grows, but CPU utilization stays low because the bottleneck is a downstream dependency, not compute. The operations team wants the MIG to scale based on the actual pending-transaction backlog rather than CPU. What should they implement to drive autoscaling on this business signal?

Accepted Answer

Publish the pending-transaction count as a custom metric to Cloud Monitoring and configure the MIG autoscaler to scale on that custom metric.

Answer

Increase the CPU target utilization threshold on the existing CPU-based autoscaling policy so instances scale sooner.

Answer

Configure an uptime check against the service and add instances manually whenever the check reports elevated latency.

Answer

Enable predictive autoscaling based on historical CPU patterns to add capacity before latency spikes occur.