Stolen CPU is a metric that’s often looked at but can be hard to understand. It implies some malevolent intent from your virtual neighbors. In reality, it is a relative measure of the cycles a CPU should have been able to run but could not due to the hypervisor diverting cycles away from the instance. From the point of view of your application, stolen CPU cycles are cycles that your application could have used.
Some of these diverted cycles stem from the hypervisor enforcing a quota based on the ECU you have purchased. In other cases, such as the one shown below, the amount of diverted or stolen CPU cycles varies over time, presumably due to other instances on the same physical hardware also requesting CPU cycles from the underlying hardware.
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https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/understanding-aws-stolen-cpu-and-how-it-affects-your-apps/
