Dude! This is so boss. I've been looking for exactly this for Techendo - as you can guess our traffic varies by time of day. Being able to ramp services up as I need them would help tremendously.

Congrats on the launch and thanks for helping!

Have you done any comparisons/benchmarks vs Adept Scale, Bounscale, or HireFire? Also why Google Analytics default as opposed to some other service?

We haven't benchmarked against other autoscalers or done any direct comparisons.

Our main motivation was to write something that scaled as we scale manually (i.e. when we get a lot of traffic due to press hits etc, we scale up based on GA realtime data as well as New Relic response times). When we were given access to the GA live API it just seemed like a natural fit.

Just speaking off the top of my head here, but services like HireFire ping the Heroku API to poll for information on when to scale. The Heroku API is a little rate limited. You'll probably get a more responsive result using GA.

HireFire uses New Relic. I would think that's more responsive than GA.

I have a similar (not auto-scaling) project also named Dynosaur from over two years ago. https://github.com/stevegraham/dynosaur

Woah! So sorry to be treading on your namespace! I did a google search for the 'Dynosaur' and didn't get any hits if I recall. We will put our heads together and come up for a new name for our project later today.

No offense intended: you picked a cool name!

Dynosoar?

Looks great. Wouldn't work well for us though because our main enemy is over-aggressive spiders that don't trigger Analytics trackers.

Same might apply to an overloaded api / anything not serving html pages to browsers.

Heroku provides log-runtime-metrics, which includes current cpu load / pending cpu tasks. The librato addon also shows request throughput in its dashboard UI. I'm not sure where it gets this data from. If not logging then perhaps new relic?