Utilization is a percentage representation of active processes handling web requests in your app. Nearing 100% utilization means almost all processes are actively handling requests almost all the time, which also means the app has very little room for handling traffic spikes without bringing in more processes.

You can use the utilization metrics to control autoscaling for your app, either on its own or combined with request queue time:

Read more about proactive vs reactive autoscaling and how utilization works in our blog, and check out the documentation to get started.