This course shows you how to monitor your operations on GCP. It starts with monitoring dashboards. You'll learn what they are and how to create, list, view, and filter them. You'll also see how to create a custom dashboard right in the GCP console.
The course then moves on to monitoring and alerting, where you'll learn about SLI-based alerting policies and third-party integrations. You'll also learn about SLO monitoring and alerting, along with integrating GCP monitoring with products like Grafana. We’ll wrap things up by touching on SIEM tools that are used to analyze audit and flow logs.
This course contains a handful of demos that give you a practical look at how to apply these monitoring techniques on the GCP platform. If you have any feedback relating to this course, feel free to reach out to us at support@cloudacademy.com.
Learning Objectives
- Create, list, view, and filter dashboards
- Configure notifications, including through third-party channels
- Learn about SLI- and SLO-based alerting and monitoring
- Integrate GCP operations monitoring with Grafana
- Analyze logs with SIEM tools
Intended Audience
This course is intended for anyone who wishes to learn how to manage GCP Operations monitoring.
Prerequisites
To get the most out of this course, you should already have some experience with Google Cloud Platform.
Hello and welcome back. In this demonstration here, we're going to walk through the process of creating a pretty basic custom dashboard through the Cloud Console. Now on the screen here, you can see we're logged into our Google Cloud Platform, Cloud Console, and we're in the Dashboards Overview page.
To create a custom dashboard, there's only a few steps involved. From this page, what we can do to begin the process is click on Create Dashboard up here at the top. And we're immediately prompted for a name for the dashboard. So what we'll do here for our custom dashboard is we'll just call it My Dashboard. And we'll confirm it. And just like that, we have a dashboard.
Now, of course, this dashboard is kind of useless because we're not displaying anything. So what we need to do is add some charts to it. Now, I don't have a whole lot going on in my Google Cloud environment. So some of these charts may be blank, but the process obviously is the same.
So what we're going to do to add a few charts here is simply from this dashboard page here, for the newly created dashboard, is simply click Add Chart. Now, from this Add Chart page, what we can do is give our new chart a title, and then we can specify the data we want to add. So what we're going to do here is in this find resource type and metrics box, let's just search for CPU. Let's see what we can find here.
Now, after we search for CPU, we can see all kinds of CPU information that's available here. Credit balances, utilizations, Kubernetes information regarding CPU, big table, all kinds of information. If we scroll down here, let's see if we can find anything regarding our Virtual Machine Instances. So we can see CPU Utilization for compute instances. So we'll go ahead and select this metric and we'll set it to six weeks.
Now we can leave the chart title as it is, VM Instance - CPU Utilization, or we can change it here. I'll leave this at its default name and we'll save it. We can see, we have a little bit of data here, not a whole lot, but enough to demonstrate here.
Let's go ahead and add another chart here. And this time we'll look for information on memory utilization. And here we can see information on accelerator memory, available memory for RDS, utilization, cache size, block, hash size, all kinds of information. We'll just select Container Memory Allocation here. And if we hover over the icon here for Filter, we can see how we can apply different filters to remove noise in the graph and noise is stuff we're not necessarily interested in.
We can also group our data. And this group by option, what it does is allow us to divide a set of time series into different groups that match whatever labels we define. The Aggregator here allows us to aggregate different data points across multiple time series. If we select Add a Metric here, we can add even more information, but we'll go ahead and click Save here. And now we have container memory allocation along with VM instance - CPU Utilization. And we can add whatever charts we need right into our dashboard here.
If we go back out to the Dashboards Overview, we see my dashboard now listed as a custom dashboard. Again, if we filter on custom, we can see my dashboard listed. We select the dashboard here. We go back out and can look at the information that's important to us. So with that, let's call it a wrap and I'll see you in the next lesson.
Tom is a 25+ year veteran of the IT industry, having worked in environments as large as 40k seats and as small as 50 seats. Throughout the course of a long an interesting career, he has built an in-depth skillset that spans numerous IT disciplines. Tom has designed and architected small, large, and global IT solutions.
In addition to the Cloud Platform and Infrastructure MCSE certification, Tom also carries several other Microsoft certifications. His ability to see things from a strategic perspective allows Tom to architect solutions that closely align with business needs.
In his spare time, Tom enjoys camping, fishing, and playing poker.