I hope you enjoyed learning about the Cloud Operations Suite. Let’s do a quick review of what you learned.

You can use the Cloud Operations suite (formerly known as Stackdriver) for monitoring, logging, error reporting, debugging, profiling, and tracing your applications.

You don’t need to install the Monitoring Agent to be able to use Monitoring, but if you do install it, you can get more information about an instance, such as about the third-party software running on it.

To monitor a server, first you need to create an Uptime Check. Then you need to set up an Alert Policy. To see data graphically, create a Dashboard. 

Cloud Audit Logs keep track of who did what, where, and when. There are three types of audit logs. Admin Activity logs track any actions that modify a resource. This includes everything from shutting down VMs to modifying permissions. System Event logs track Google’s actions on Compute Engine resources. Some examples are maintenance of the underlying host and reclaiming a preemptible instance. Data Access logs track data requests, including read requests on configurations and metadata.

Cloud Logging can even collect logs from other cloud platforms like AWS. You just need to install the Logging Agent on any system that you want to get logs from.

If you need to do serious log analysis, then you can export the logs to BigQuery. In this case, BigQuery acts as a sink for log data. To do a search in BigQuery, you need to use SQL statements.

The Error Reporting service alerts you to errors in your applications. You can use the Debugger to figure out what’s causing an error.

Cloud Profiler and Cloud Trace are used to analyze performance problems in applications. A trace is an individual request to an application. Cloud Trace shows you how much time was taken by each of the calls generated by an application request.

If you’re running your applications in App Engine, then it’ll automatically capture and submit traces. If you want to trace code that’s running outside of App Engine, then you’ll have to add instrumentation code to your applications. The recommended way is to use OpenTelemetry and the associated Cloud Trace client library.

To learn more about the Cloud Operations suite, you can read Google’s documentation. Also watch for new Google Cloud Platform courses on Cloud Academy, because we’re always publishing new courses. If you have any questions or comments, please let us know in the Cloud Academy Community or send an email to support@cloudacademy.com. Before you go, please give this course a rating. Thanks!

Lectures

Introduction - Monitoring - Logging - Error Reporting and Debugging - Tracing