---
title: "Operational guidelines"
description: "Guidelines for Aerospike Cloud high availability, performance monitoring, scaling, and disaster recovery."
---

# Operational guidelines

> For the complete documentation index see: [llms.txt](https://aerospike.com/docs/llms.txt)
> 
> All documentation pages available in markdown.

Follow these guidelines to maintain high availability and optimal performance for your Aerospike Cloud deployment.

-   Monitor memory, CPU, replica lag, and storage usage continuously using [metrics](https://aerospike.com/docs/cloud/observe/metrics) emitted from the Aerospike Prometheus endpoint.
-   Set alerts for significant changes in usage patterns or when approaching resource limits for storage, memory, and CPU.
-   [Scale clusters](https://aerospike.com/docs/cloud/manage/modify) proactively to ensure sufficient capacity for your workload and prevent service degradation.
    -   Account for time for migrations to complete when scaling up clusters.
-   Enable circuit breaker functionality in your [Aerospike clients](https://aerospike.com/docs/cloud/develop/client) and configure appropriate retry timeouts.
-   For disaster recovery, configure standby clusters using [cross-datacenter replication (XDR)](https://aerospike.com/docs/cloud/manage/xdr-setup) and regularly test failover to measure recovery time for your workload.
-   Perform [backups](https://aerospike.com/docs/cloud/manage/backups) during low write activity periods to minimize impact, and regularly test restores to verify data recovery readiness.
-   Maintain secure network connectivity configurations ([VPC peering](https://aerospike.com/docs/cloud/manage/vpc-peering), private endpoints, firewall rules) following Aerospike [security recommendations](https://aerospike.com/docs/cloud/security/security-practices).
-   Ensure proper [TLS configuration](https://aerospike.com/docs/cloud/develop/client) in clients for encrypted communication with the database.