Here at Planet Domain we have a lot of day to day challenges in performance and cost management.

We built a fantastic CD pipeline that allows our developers to rapidly spin up new infrastructure, enabling them to quickly build, test and deploy new features with minimal assistance from the Ops team.

Unfortunately, it also allows our developers to rapidly spin up new infrastructure than then lays idle for the greater part of the day, sucking money out of budget that could otherwise be used on beer, pizza and Xbox accessories.

Now, Cloudwatch is great, but it does tend to involve a lot of clicky-clicky mouse-movey, clicky-clicky stuff in the AWS console. And once you’ve got a lot of points to monitor, the graphs become unreadable. And the filtering options are sometimes finnicky, and it’s not easy to automate things like CloudWatch Dashboards using CloudFormation.

So to get a report on average CPU utilization across our AWS Autoscaling Groups, I turned to PowerShell. Continue reading →