Managing Application Logs and Metrics on GCP

Logging is very important today given the volume and variety of data we deal with across different customer use cases. This lesson will enable you to take a more proactive approach towards identifying faults and crashes in your applications through the effective use of Google Cloud Logging. As a result, you will learn how to delegate the operational overhead to GCP through automated logging tools, resulting in a more productive operational pipeline for your team and organization. 

Learning Objectives

Through this lesson, you will equip yourself with the required skills for streaming log data to Google Cloud Logging service and use metrics to understand your system's behavior. The lesson will start with an introduction to the Cloud Logging Service and then demonstrate how to stream logs using Cloud Logging Agent and the Python client library.

Prerequisites

To get the most out of this lesson, you should already have an understanding of application logging.

Intended Audience

This lesson is suited for anyone interested in logging using Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Cloud Logging.

Resources

• Source code for this lesson: https://github.com/cloudacademy/Managing-Application-Logs-and-Metrics-on-GCP
• Google Cloud fluentd source code: https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/google-fluentd
• Google Cloud fluentd additional configurations: https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/fluentd-catch-all-config 
• Google Cloud fluentd output plugin configuration: https://cloud.google.com/logging/docs/agent/logging/configuration#cloud-fluentd-config
• Package release history: https://pypi.org/project/google-cloud-logging/#history
• Metrics Explorer pricing: https://cloud.google.com/stackdriver/pricing#metrics-chargeable