How to Monitor and Auto Adjust AWS Service Quotas?

Running into AWS service quota limits can cause troubles or even downtimes. Therefore, the announcement of Service Quotas Automatic Management in October 2025 caught my attention. My idea was to add service quota observation to our event-driven monitoring solution for AWS called marbot. Here is what I learned from taking a look into the details of Service Quotas Automatic Management.

What is Service Quotas Automatic Management?

AWS released Service Quotas Automatic Management on Oct 7, 2025 to provide a solution for monitoring and automatically adjusting service quotas.

Service Quotas Automatic Management comes with the following features.

• Send notifications about service quotas
  • 80% utilization
  • 95% utilization
• Auto-adjust service quota

How to enable Service Quotas Automatic Management?

Unfortunately, neither CloudFormation/CDK nor Terraform supports enabling automatic management for service quotas.

The following command shows how to enable notifications when reaching service quotas with the help of the AWS CLI. Alternatively, you could use the AWS Management Console as well as the API.

aws service-quotas start-auto-management  --opt-in-level ACCOUNT --opt-in-type NotifyOnly

In case you want to automatically increase service quotas, use the opt-in type NotifyAndAdjust.

aws service-quotas start-auto-management  --opt-in-level ACCOUNT --opt-in-type NotifyAndAdjust

How to receive notifications when service quotas are close?

Service Quotas Automatic Management supports the following services to deliver notifications.

• AWS Health (Default)
• AWS User Notifications (Default)
• Email
• AWS Console Mobile App
• Amazon Q Developer chat

The following screenshot shows a service quota notification delivered by the AWS User Notifications service.

Also, it is possible to subscribe to events from Service Quotas Automatic Management via AWS EventBridge. The source of the events is aws.health. Use the eventTypeCode for more detailed filtering.

{
  "source": [
    "aws.health"
  ],
  "detail-type": [
    "AWS Health Event"
  ],
  "detail": {
    "service": [
      "SERVICEQUOTAS"
    ],
    "eventTypeCode": [
      "AWS_SERVICEQUOTAS_THRESHOLD_BREACH",
      "AWS_SERVICEQUOTAS_INCREASE_REQUEST_FAILED",
      "AWS_SERVICEQUOTAS_APPROACHING_THRESHOLD"
    ],
    "eventTypeCategory": [
      "accountNotification"
    ]
  }
}

The following snippet shows an example of a Service Quotas Automatic Management event.

{
  "account": "1122334455566",
  "detail": {
    "actionability": "ACTION_REQUIRED",
    "affectedAccount": "1122334455566",
    "affectedEntities": [
      {
        "entityValue": "Service: dynamodb | Quota Name: Maximum number of tables | Utilization: 82.56%",
        "lastUpdatedTime": "Tue, 13 Jan 2026 10:10:34 GMT"
      }
    ],
    "backupEvent": "false",
    "communicationId": "c7f878c0ef502ffb41c58f8c0de6c733ddbd62fcf82d3891a296512bbccae440-1",
    "endTime": "Tue, 20 Jan 2026 10:10:33 GMT",
    "eventArn": "arn:aws:health:eu-west-1::event/SERVICEQUOTAS/AWS_SERVICEQUOTAS_APPROACHING_THRESHOLD/AWS_SERVICEQUOTAS_APPROACHING_THRESHOLD-DUB-1768299033803",
    "eventDescription": [
      {
        "language": "en_US",
        "latestDescription": "You are receiving this message because you opted to receive notifications from Service Quotas when utilization exceeds (80/95)% threshold.\\n\\nAt Tue, 13 Jan 2026 10:10:33 GMT, we detected that your AWS account is approaching the utilization threshold for one or more service quotas.\\n\\nA list of your affected service quota(s) can be found in the \\\"Affected resources\\\" tab of your AWS Health Dashboard under the format \\\"Service | Quota Name | Utilization Percentage\\\".\\n\\nTo proactively prevent any potential service disruption, we recommend:\\n1. Reviewing your current resource usage and growth patterns\\n2. Requesting a quota increase if needed via the Service Quotas console\\n\\nYou can manage your service quotas through the Service Quotas console (1) or APIs (2).\\n\\nIf you have any questions or concerns, please contact the AWS Support Team (3).\\n\\n(1) https://console.aws.amazon.com/servicequotas\\n(2) https://docs.aws.amazon.com/servicequotas/2019-06-24/apireference/API_Operations.html\\n(3) https://aws.amazon.com/support"
      }
    ],
    "eventRegion": "eu-west-1",
    "eventScopeCode": "ACCOUNT_SPECIFIC",
    "eventTypeCategory": "accountNotification",
    "eventTypeCode": "AWS_SERVICEQUOTAS_APPROACHING_THRESHOLD",
    "lastUpdatedTime": "Tue, 13 Jan 2026 10:10:34 GMT",
    "page": "1",
    "personas": [
      "OPERATIONS"
    ],
    "service": "SERVICEQUOTAS",
    "startTime": "Tue, 13 Jan 2026 10:10:33 GMT",
    "statusCode": "open",
    "totalPages": "1"
  },
  "detail-type": "AWS Health Event",
  "id": "929e5b05-48f3-8150-59ee-a98f2555dc90",
  "region": "eu-west-1",
  "resources": [
    "Service: dynamodb | Quota Name: Maximum number of tables | Utilization: 82.56%"
  ],
  "source": "aws.health",
  "time": "2026-01-13T10:11:16Z",
  "version": "0"
}

It’s a pity that the event is not very well designed. For example, it should include the quote code and service code, as this would allow you to call the RequestServiceQuotaIncrease API action automatically. Instead, all we get from the event details is the affected resources—for example Service: dynamodb | Quota Name: Maximum number of tables | Utilization: 82.56% - and an ID/link to the AWS Health notification.

Also, AWS not only sends a notification once for getting close to or breaching a service quota. Instead, AWS repeats sending a notification every 24 hours. So you need to implement deduplication to avoid notifications piling up.

How to increase AWS service quotas automatically?

Service Quotas Automatic Management comes with the ability to auto-adjust service quotas. Unlike manual quota increases, auto-adjust requests are handled through a specialized, automated workflow that does not require an AWS Support case.

In case a quota increase fails, you will receive a notification, but specific rejection details aren’t available.

Unfortunately, the feature is not working correctly. For testing, I created 50 AppSync GraphQL APIs to reach the service quota. However, the auto-adjustment did not work. I’m still waiting for a response from the AWS service team.

Limitations of Service Quotas Automatic Management

Even though you are using Service Quotas Automatic Management, you might run into issues caused by reaching service quotas.

First, Service Quotas Automatic Management does not support all quotas. Monitoring and notifications are only available for a subset of all service quotas. And only a subset of that supports auto-adjust.

To get a list of all supported quotas, go to the tab Automatic Management in the Service Quota management console and press the View supported quotas button.

For example, Automatic Management supports only three of the DynamoDB quotas. And auto-adjusting is not available at all for DynamoDB quotas.

Second, it takes between one and three hours until Automatic Management detects that a service quota is reached. The relatively long response time can lead to problems occurring during operation even before this point.

Summary

The monitoring of service quotes has become a lot easier with Service Quotas Automatic Management. Notifications allow you to increase service quotas before they affect workloads. The ability to auto-adjust quotas is even more convenient. Unfortunately, the usefulness of both the notifications and the auto-adjustment is limited, as not all quotas are supported. So you cannot rely on the solution.

By the way, marbot our solution for AWS monitoring, already supports service quota notifications, as shown in the following screenshot. Did you know that marbot event dedouplicate events? Quite helpful, as Service Quotas Automatic Management sends the same notifications multiple times.