Your operations team has asked you to help diagnose a performance issue in a production application that runs on Compute Engine. The application is dropping requests that reach it when under heavy load. The process list for affected instances shows a single application process that is consuming all available CPU, and autoscaling has reached the upper limit of instances. There is no abnormal load on any other related systems, including the database. You want to allow production traffic to be served again as quickly as possible. Which action should you recommend?

The correct action is to increase the maximum number of instances in the autoscaling group. The problem states that autoscaling has reached its upper limit, and the application is dropping requests due to CPU exhaustion on existing instances. By increasing the maximum, the autoscaler can provision more instances, distributing the load and alleviating the CPU bottleneck, allowing production traffic to be served quickly. Changing the autoscaling metric to memory usage is incorrect because the problem explicitly states CPU exhaustion, not memory. Restarting instances or application processes would cause further downtime and wouldn't address the underlying capacity issue under heavy load.