Estimate Vertical Pod Autoscaler recommended requests based on historical usage.
The Vertical Pod Autoscaler's recommender tracks a decaying histogram of usage and targets a high percentile (commonly p95 or p90) plus a margin, rather than the raw peak, to avoid overreacting to one-off spikes. This calculator reproduces that logic in simplified form — applying a percentage margin over p95 usage — and compares the result to the pod's current request to show whether VPA would recommend scaling up or down.
recommended = p95Usage × (1 + marginPercent / 100)
Peak usage can be a single outlier event; p95 usage reflects sustained near-peak behavior while filtering out one-off spikes, giving a recommendation that's stable across normal traffic variance rather than chasing the single highest data point ever seen.
Off (recommend only, no changes applied), Initial (apply only at pod creation), and Auto/Recreate (VPA evicts and recreates pods with new resource values) — always verify update mode before assuming VPA will change running pods automatically.
Not safely on the same metric — VPA adjusting CPU requests while HPA scales replicas based on CPU utilization creates a feedback loop. Common practice is VPA on memory only, paired with HPA on CPU or custom metrics.