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--- title: Configure autoscaling for Service Fabric managed cluster nodes description: Learn how to configure autoscaling policies on Service Fabric managed cluster. ms.topic: how-to ms.author: tomcassidy author: tomvcassidy ms.service: azure-service-fabric services: service-fabric ms.date: 03/22/2026 # Customer intent: As a cloud administrator, I want to configure autoscaling for Service Fabric managed clusters, so that I can optimize resource allocation and reduce management overhead based on workload demand. --- # Introduction to Autoscaling on Service Fabric managed clusters [Autoscaling](/azure/azure-monitor/autoscale/autoscale-overview) gives great elasticity and enables addition or reduction of nodes on demand on a secondary node type. This automated and elastic behavior reduces the management overhead and potential business impact by monitoring and optimizing the number of nodes servicing your workload. You configure rules for your workload and let autoscaling handle the rest. When those defined thresholds are met, autoscale rules take action to adjust the capacity of your node type. Autoscaling can be enabled, disabled, or configured at any time. This article provides an example deployment, how to enable or disable autoscaling, and how to configure an example autoscale policy. **Requirements and supported metrics:** * The Service Fabric managed cluster resource apiVersion should be **2022-01-01** or later. * The cluster SKU must be Standard. * Can only be configured on a secondary node type in your cluster. * After enabling autoscale for a node type, make the following nodetype template changes to avoid overwriting the current node type VM count: * Configure the `vmInstanceCount` property to `-1` when redeploying the resource. * Omit the [`sku.capacity`](https://learn.microsoft.com/dotnet/api/azure.resourcemanager.servicefabricmanagedclusters.models.nodetypesku.capacity) property. * Only [Azure Monitor published metrics](/azure/azure-monitor/essentials/metrics-supported) are supported. >[!NOTE] > If using Windows OS image with Hyper-V role enabled, that is, the virtual machine (VM) is configured for nested virtualization, the Available Memory Metric won't be available, since the dynamic memory driver within the VM will be in a stopped state. A common scenario where autoscaling is useful is when the load on a particular service varies over time. For example, a service such as a gateway can scale based on the amount of resources necessary to handle incoming requests. Let's take a look at an example of what those scaling rules could look like and we use them later in the article: * If all instances of my gateway are using more than 70% on average, then scale out the gateway service by adding two more instances. Do this every 30 minutes, but never have more than 20 instances in total. * If all instances of my gateway are using less than 40% cores on average, then scale the service in by removing one instance. Do this every 30 minutes, but never have fewer than three instances in total. ## Example autoscale deployment This example walks through: * Creating a Standard SKU Service Fabric managed cluster with two node types, `NT1` and `NT2` by default. * Adding autoscale rules to the secondary node type, `NT2`. >[!NOTE] > Autoscale of the node type is done based on the managed cluster VMSS CPU host metrics. > VMSS resource is autoresolved in the template. The following will take you step by step through setup of a cluster with autoscale configured. 1) Create resource group in a region ```powershell Login-AzAccount Select-AzSubscription -SubscriptionId $subscriptionid New-AzResourceGroup -Name $myresourcegroup -Location $location ``` 2) Create cluster resource Download this sample [Standard SKU Service Fabric managed cluster sample](https://github.com/Azure-Samples/service-fabric-cluster-templates/tree/master/SF-Managed-Standard-SKU-2-NT-Autoscale/azuredeploy.json) Execute this command to deploy the cluster resource: ```powershell $parameters = @{ clusterName = $clusterName adminPassword = $VmAdminPassword clientCertificateThumbprint = $clientCertificateThumbprint } New-AzResourceGroupDeployment -Name "deploy_cluster" -ResourceGroupName $resourceGroupName -TemplateFile .\azuredeploy.json -TemplateParameterObject $parameters -Verbose ``` 3) Configure and enable autoscale rules on a secondary node type Download the [managed cluster autoscale sample template](https://github.com/Azure-Samples/service-fabric-cluster-templates/tree/master/SF-Managed-Standard-SKU-2-NT-Autoscale/sfmc-deploy-autoscale.json) that you'll use to configure autoscaling with the following commands: ```powershell $parameters = @{ clusterName = $clusterName } New-AzResourceGroupDeployment -Name "deploy_autoscale" -ResourceGroupName $resourceGroupName -TemplateFile .\sfmc-deploy-autoscale.json -TemplateParameterObject $parameters -Verbose ``` >[!NOTE] > After this deployment completes, future cluster resource deployments must set the `vmInstanceCount` property to `-1` and omit the [`sku.capacity`](https://learn.microsoft.com/dotnet/api/azure.resourcemanager.servicefabricmanagedclusters.models.nodetypesku.capacity) property on secondary node types that have autoscale rules enabled to avoid overwriting the current VM count of the node type. ## Enable or disable autoscaling on a secondary node type Node types deployed by Service Fabric managed cluster don't enable autoscaling by default. Autoscaling can be enabled or disabled at any time, per node type, that are configured and available. To enable this feature, configure the `enabled` property under the type `Microsoft.Insights/autoscaleSettings` in an ARM Template as shown below: ```JSON "resources": [ { "type": "Microsoft.Insights/autoscaleSettings", "apiVersion": "2015-04-01", "name": "[concat(parameters('clusterName'), '-', parameters('nodeType2Name'))]", "location": "[resourceGroup().location]", "properties": { "name": "[concat(parameters('clusterName'), '-', parameters('nodeType2Name'))]", "targetResourceUri": "[concat('/subscriptions/', subscription().subscriptionId, '/resourceGroups/', resourceGroup().name, '/providers/Microsoft.ServiceFabric/managedclusters/', parameters('clusterName'), '/nodetypes/', parameters('nodeType2Name'))]", "enabled": true, ... ``` To disable autoscaling, set the value to `false` ## Delete autoscaling rules To delete any autoscaling policies setup for a node type, you can run the following PowerShell command. ```PowerShell Remove-AzResource -ResourceId "/subscriptions/$subscriptionId/resourceGroups/$resourceGroup/providers/microsoft.insights/autoscalesettings/$name" -Force ``` ## Set policies for autoscaling A Service Fabric managed cluster doesn't configure any [policies for autoscaling](/azure/azure-monitor/autoscale/autoscale-understanding-settings) by default. Autoscaling policies must be configured for any scaling actions to occur on the underlying resources. The following example sets a policy for `nodeType2Name` to be at least three nodes, but allow scaling up to 20 nodes. It triggers scaling up when average CPU usage is 70% over the last 30 minutes with 1-minute granularity. It triggers scaling down once average CPU usage is under 40% for the last 30 minutes with 1-minute granularity. ```JSON "resources": [ { "type": "Microsoft.Insights/autoscaleSettings", "apiVersion": "2015-04-01", "name": "[concat(parameters('clusterName'), '-', parameters('nodeType2Name'))]", "location": "[resourceGroup().location]", "properties": { "name": "[concat(parameters('clusterName'), '-', parameters('nodeType2Name'))]", "targetResourceUri": "[concat('/subscriptions/', subscription().subscriptionId, '/resourceGroups/', resourceGroup().name, '/providers/Microsoft.ServiceFabric/managedclusters/', parameters('clusterName'), '/nodetypes/', parameters('nodeType2Name'))]", "enabled": "[parameters('enableAutoScale')]", "profiles": [ { "name": "Autoscale by percentage based on CPU usage", "capacity": { "minimum": "3", "maximum": "20", "default": "3" }, "rules": [ { "metricTrigger": { "metricName": "Percentage CPU", "metricNamespace": "", "metricResourceUri": "[concat('/subscriptions/',subscription().subscriptionId,'/resourceGroups/SFC_', reference(resourceId('Microsoft.ServiceFabric/managedClusters', parameters('clusterName')), '2022-01-01').clusterId,'/providers/Microsoft.Compute/virtualMachineScaleSets/',parameters('nodeType2Name'))]", "timeGrain": "PT1M", "statistic": "Average", "timeWindow": "PT30M", "timeAggregation": "Average", "operator": "GreaterThan", "threshold": 70 }, "scaleAction": { "direction": "Increase", "type": "ChangeCount", "value": "5", "cooldown": "PT5M" } }, { "metricTrigger": { "metricName": "Percentage CPU", "metricNamespace": "", "metricResourceUri": "[concat('/subscriptions/',subscription().subscriptionId,'/resourceGroups/SFC_', reference(resourceId('Microsoft.ServiceFabric/managedClusters', parameters('clusterName')), '2022-01-01').clusterId,'/providers/Microsoft.Compute/virtualMachineScaleSets/',parameters('nodeType2Name'))]", "timeGrain": "PT1M", "statistic": "Average", "timeWindow": "PT30M", "timeAggregation": "Average", "operator": "LessThan", "threshold": 40 }, "scaleAction": { "direction": "Decrease", "type": "ChangeCount", "value": "1", "cooldown": "PT5M" } } ] } ] } } ] ``` You can download this [ARM Template to enable autoscale](https://github.com/Azure-Samples/service-fabric-cluster-templates/tree/master/SF-Managed-Standard-SKU-2-NT-Autoscale/sfmc-deploy-autoscale.json) which contains the above example ## View configured autoscale definitions of your managed cluster resource You can view configured autoscale settings by using [Azure Resource Explorer](https://resources.azure.com/). 1) Go to [Azure Resource Explorer](https://resources.azure.com/) 2) Navigate to `subscriptions` -> `SubscriptionName` -> `resource group` -> `microsoft.insights` -> `autoscalesettings` -> Autoscale policy name: e.g. `sfmc01-NT2`. You should see something similar to this on the navigation tree: ![Azure Resource Explorer example tree view][autoscale-are-tree] 3) On the right-hand side, you can view the full definition of this autoscale setting. In this example, autoscale is configured with a CPU% based scale-out and scale-in rule. ![Azure Resource Explorer example node type autoscale details][autoscale-nt-details] ## Troubleshooting Some things to consider: * Review autoscale events that are being triggered against managed clusters secondary node types 1) Go to the cluster Activity log 2) Review activity log for Autoscale scale up/down completed operation * How many VMs are configured for the node type and is the workload occurring on all of them or just some? * Are your scale-in and scale-out thresholds sufficiently different? Suppose you set a rule to scale out when average CPU is greater than 50% over five minutes, and to scale in when average CPU is less than 50%. This setting would cause a "flapping" problem when CPU usage is close to the threshold, with scale actions constantly increasing and decreasing the size of the set. Because of this setting, the autoscale service tries to prevent "flapping," which can manifest as not scaling. Therefore, be sure your scale-out and scale-in thresholds are sufficiently different to allow some space in between scaling. * Can you scale in or out a node type? Adjust the count of nodes at the node type level and make sure it completes successfully. [How to scale a node type on a managed cluster](how-to-managed-cluster-modify-node-type.md#scale-a-node-type) * Check your Microsoft.ServiceFabric/managedclusters/nodetypes, and Microsoft.Insights resources in the Azure Resource Explorer The Azure Resource Explorer is an indispensable troubleshooting tool that shows you the state of your Azure Resource Manager resources. Select your subscription and look at the Resource Group you're troubleshooting. Under the `ServiceFabric/managedclusters/clustername` resource provider, look under `NodeTypes` for node types you created and check properties to validate `provisioningState` is `Succeeded`. Then, go into the Microsoft.Insights resource provider under `clustername` and check that the autoscale rules look right. * Are your emitted metric values as expected? Use the `Get-AzMetric` [PowerShell module to get the metric values of a resource](/powershell/module/az.monitor/get-azmetric) and review Once you've been through these steps, if you're still having autoscale problems, you can try the following resources: [Log a support request](./service-fabric-support.md#create-an-azure-support-request). Be prepared to share the template and a view of your performance data. ## Next steps > [!div class="nextstepaction"] > [Read about Azure Monitor autoscale support](/azure/azure-monitor/autoscale/autoscale-overview) > [!div class="nextstepaction"] > [Review Metrics in Azure Monitor](/azure/azure-monitor/essentials/data-platform-metrics) > [!div class="nextstepaction"] > [Service Fabric managed cluster configuration options](how-to-managed-cluster-configuration.md) [autoscale-are-tree]: ./media/how-to-managed-cluster-autoscale/autoscale-are-tree.png [autoscale-nt-details]: ./media/how-to-managed-cluster-autoscale/autoscale-nt-details.png