Hello and welcome to creating a monitoring dashboard. In this lesson, we are going to take a look at what dashboards are, how you use them, and how to create them.

Monitoring dashboards in GCP are used to view and analyze metrics data for your environment. Cloud monitoring offers both predefined dashboards and custom dashboards. 

The predefined dashboards allow you to quickly get to monitoring your Google Cloud resources and services without needing to perform any setup or configuration – and they come in three flavors: Google Cloud Platform, Applications, and Amazon Web Services. The Google Cloud Platform dashboards are used for Google Cloud products. The Applications dashboards are used for third-party apps like Cassandra and nginx. And, as its name implies, the Amazon Web Services dashboards are used for AWS services.

I should mention that you cannot delete a predefined dashboard, nor can you modify which charts are displayed on a predefined dashboard.

Custom dashboards offer you the ability to choose which charts are displayed and how those charts are configured. If you wish to use a custom dashboard, you can create it through the Google Cloud Console or via the “Dashboard” endpoint in the Cloud Monitoring API.

There are several quotas, limits, and authorizations that you need to be aware of before creating charts and dashboards. For example, it’s important to note that there is a limit of 1000 dashboards per workspace – and each dashboard can include a maximum of 25 charts. Each chart can include a max of 300 lines.

To create a dashboard - or to add charts to an existing dashboard - through the Cloud Console, your Cloud IAM role name for the Google Cloud project you are working in must be either Monitoring Editor, Monitoring Admin, or Project Owner.

If you prefer to use the Cloud Monitoring API to create your dashboard or to add charts, your Cloud IAM role ID for the project you are working in must be, at a minimum, roles/monitoring.dahboardEditor. This role provides the minimum permissions needed to create a dashboard or to add charts to a dashboard. Other role IDs that will allow you to create dashboards and to add charts are role/monitoring.editor, role/monitoring.admin, and role/owner.

In the next lesson, I’m going to show you how to list, view, and filter dashboards. However, before doing so, I do want to point out that the performance of any given chart is going to be tied to the number of time series that you intend to display. The number of time series are dependent, at least in part, on the structure of the metric type and monitored-resource type that are associated with the time series.

If you run into performance issues when displaying your metrics data, there are several steps you can take to improve the performance of your chart. You can filter your chart to remove unnecessary information, or you can combine multiple time series to collapse related information together. Another step you can take is to use outlier mode to focus on unusual data.

Join me in the next lesson, where I’ll show you how to list, view, and filter dashboards.