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High CPU throttling or latency spike

Pods hit CPU limits, HPA lagging, or node CPU saturated.

Reviewed: ·Tested on: Kubernetes 1.29, Terraform 1.8, Ubuntu 22.04

Symptoms

  • CPU throttling in metrics or describe
  • P99 latency spike with flat error rate
  • HPA not scaling fast enough

1Find throttled pods

kubectl top pods -n <ns> --sort-by=cpu
kubectl describe pod <pod> -n <ns> | grep -i cpu
PromQL CPU snippet →

2Check HPA and limits

kubectl get hpa -n <ns>
kubectl describe hpa <name> -n <ns>
kubectl get deploy <name> -n <ns> -o jsonpath='{.spec.template.spec.containers[0].resources}'
HPA config →

3Node saturation

kubectl top nodes
kubectl describe node <node> | grep -A5 Allocated

Related

kubernetesprometheusgrafanakubectlk8s-hpak8s-deployment-service