dynamo/docs/components/planner

Planner

The Planner monitors system performance and automatically scales prefill/decode workers to meet latency SLAs. It runs as a component inside the Dynamo inference graph on Kubernetes.

New to the Planner? Start with the SLA Planner Quick Start Guide for a complete workflow including profiling and deployment.

Feature Matrix

Category	Feature	Status
Backend	Local (bare metal)	Deprecated
	Kubernetes	Supported
LLM Framework	vLLM	Supported
	TensorRT-LLM	Supported
	SGLang	Supported
Serving Type	Aggregated	Unsupported
	Disaggregated	Supported
Scaling Mode	SLA-based (TTFT/ITL targets)	Supported (primary)
	Load-based (KV cache/queue thresholds)	Deprecated
Load Predictors	ARIMA	Supported
	Prophet	Supported
	Kalman filter	Supported
	Constant (current = next)	Supported
Connectors	KubernetesConnector (native DGD scaling)	Supported
	VirtualConnector (external environments)	Supported

Quick Start

Prerequisites

• Dynamo platform installed on Kubernetes (Installation Guide)
• kube-prometheus-stack installed (Metrics Setup)
• Pre-deployment profiling completed (Profiling Guide)

Deploy with DGDR (Recommended)

The fastest path to a planner-enabled deployment is through a DynamoGraphDeploymentRequest:

kubectl apply -f benchmarks/profiler/deploy/profile_sla_aic_dgdr.yaml -n $NAMESPACE

This automatically profiles your model and deploys with the SLA planner. See SLA Planner Guide for the full workflow.

Deploy with DGD (Manual)

For manual control, use the disaggregated planner templates:

# After profiling is complete
kubectl apply -f examples/backends/vllm/deploy/disagg_planner.yaml -n $NAMESPACE

Documentation

Document	Description
Planner Guide	Deployment, configuration, integration, troubleshooting
Planner Examples	DGDR YAML examples, sample configurations, advanced patterns
SLA Planner Guide	End-to-end DGDR workflow: define SLAs, profile, deploy, monitor
SLA-based Planner	Scaling algorithm, correction factors, load prediction details
Load-based Planner	Legacy load-based scaling (deprecated)
SLA-Driven Profiling	Pre-deployment profiling process and configuration
Planner Design	Architecture deep-dive for contributors

Configuration Reference

Key Arguments

Argument	Default	Description
--namespace	$DYN_NAMESPACE or dynamo	Dynamo logical namespace
--backend	vllm	Backend framework (vllm, sglang, trtllm)
--environment	kubernetes	Deployment environment
--adjustment-interval	180	Seconds between scaling decisions
--ttft	500.0	Target Time To First Token (ms)
--itl	50.0	Target Inter-Token Latency (ms)
--isl	3000	Expected average input sequence length
--osl	150	Expected average output sequence length
--load-predictor	arima	Prediction model (arima, prophet, kalman, constant)
--max-gpu-budget	8	Maximum GPUs across all workers
--min-endpoint	1	Minimum replicas per worker type
--decode-engine-num-gpu	1	GPUs per decode engine
--prefill-engine-num-gpu	1	GPUs per prefill engine
--no-operation	false	Observation mode (no actual scaling)
--no-correction	false	Disable correction factors
--profile-results-dir	profiling_results	Path to profiling data (NPZ/JSON)

Environment Variables

Variable	Default	Description
DYN_NAMESPACE	dynamo	Dynamo logical namespace
DYN_PARENT_DGD_K8S_NAME	(required)	Parent DGD K8s resource name
PROMETHEUS_ENDPOINT	http://prometheus-kube-prometheus-prometheus.monitoring.svc.cluster.local:9090	Prometheus URL
PLANNER_PROMETHEUS_PORT	0 (disabled)	Port for planner's own Prometheus metrics

Monitoring

Grafana Dashboard

Deploy the planner dashboard:

kubectl apply -n monitoring -f deploy/observability/k8s/grafana-planner-dashboard-configmap.yaml

The dashboard shows:

• Worker counts and GPU usage over time
• Observed TTFT, ITL, request rate, sequence lengths
• Predicted load and recommended replica counts
• Correction factors (actual vs. expected performance)

Prometheus Metrics

The planner queries the frontend's /metrics endpoint via Prometheus. Required metrics:

• Request count and duration
• TTFT and ITL distributions
• Input/output sequence lengths

:hidden:

planner_guide
planner_examples