Track CI Resource Usage

Nx Cloud tracks CPU and memory usage for each task in your CI pipeline. Use this data to find resource bottlenecks, debug out-of-memory errors, and pick the right agent size for your workload.

Requirements

Requires Nx 22.1 or higher.

The CI resource usage feature with Nx Cloud requires an Enterprise plan.

Resource usage with Nx Agents

With Nx Agents, resource metrics are collected automatically. You can view this data in the Nx Cloud dashboard for any CI pipeline execution.

Viewing the analysis summary

Open any CI pipeline execution in Nx Cloud and go to the analysis section. You'll see a list of agents used for the run, along with:

• Average and maximum CPU usage
• Average and maximum memory usage
• Machine specs for that resource class

This gives you a quick look at how resources were used across all agents.

Viewing usage details

Click on any agent to see a breakdown of resource usage over time. The detail view shows:

• Memory usage by process
• CPU usage by process
• Resource consumption for each task
• Nx CLI overhead

This view helps you find exactly which task is using the most resources, not just that "something" in your pipeline is the problem.

Using the detail view

The detail view has a few features to help you dig into resource usage:

• Legend: Click items in the legend to focus on specific tasks or processes

• Timeline scrubber: Use the scrubber at the bottom to jump to specific points in time or zoom in on peak usage

• View modes: Switch between "stacked" view (total usage at any time) and "individual" view (each process separately)

• CSV export: Download the raw data if you need to dig into sub-process details

Common use cases

• Finding memory-hungry tasks: Figure out which project eats the most memory when running tasks in parallel. You can then run just that project with lower parallelism instead of slowing down everything.
• Spotting misconfigured tooling: See when a bundler or build tool is pulling in more files than it should.
• Debugging E2E bottlenecks: Find out if the slow part is the tests themselves or something in the dependency chain.
• Comparing before and after upgrades: Check if a dependency upgrade caused a spike in resource usage.
• Detecting memory leaks: Look for tasks where memory keeps climbing over time.
• Picking the right resource class: Figure out the right agent size when moving to Nx Agents from GitHub Actions or other CI providers.

Resource metrics with manual DTE

If you're running your own CI agents instead of Nx Agents, Nx Cloud can still collect per-agent CPU and memory metrics so you can debug slow tasks and OOM kills in the run timeline. Opt in by adding a single CLI step to each agent job.

Nx Enterprise Required

This feature is available on Nx Cloud Enterprise plans only. Reach out to learn more about Nx Enterprise.

What to add

At the end of each agent job, run npx nx-cloud upload-agent-metrics. Use your provider's always-run mechanism so the step runs even when the agent is killed mid-task — that's precisely the scenario where metrics are most useful.

Here's the GitHub Actions step:

- name: Upload agent metrics
  if: always()
  run: npx nx-cloud upload-agent-metrics
  env:
    NX_AGENT_NAME: ${{ matrix.agent }}

The if: always() condition is important: if an agent is OOM-killed mid-run, the normal step sequence stops — but the upload still needs to happen so you can see which task caused the kill.

Other CI providers

The Manual DTE guide shows the equivalent step for Circle CI, Azure Pipelines, Bitbucket Pipelines, GitLab CI, and Jenkins.