Monitoring account activity and application logs. We learned in the previous lecture how there are a number of separate security tools and features scattered across Google Cloud Platform that we can combine to great effect in our projects. When used together, these features provide a coherent approach for securely managing credentials and access to resources across our entire application.

In this lecture, we're going to take a guided tour through the Google Cloud Console and similarly connect the dots between some of the logging and reporting tools available to us there. An important part of application security is simply vigilance and using the tools we're going to discuss in this lecture, we'll gain full visibility of practically everything that happens on our project.

Previewing project activity. The first place we can look is the activity tab right on the Cloud Console dashboard homepage. This feed can fill up with a lot of information about every operation occurring across the entire project. There are some filters we can set to make it easier to find what we're looking for here. This activity view will basically tell us what operation was called when and by whom, but doesn't give us much information about the operation that was actually performed. This view is especially useful to track administrative activity, so you can see what members or service accounts are creating or changing resources on the project.

Viewing audit log details. For more detailed information about our application processes, we can take a look at the logs explorer. We can see log data for all of the Google resources our project uses here and can even get log data and console output from our deployed application here. We can work with a query builder here to help search these logs and save those searches to use again later. The logs explorer is the best way to see the inner workings of your deployments and get a good understanding of what your application is doing under the hood.

Monitoring application errors. Another useful tool we can find nearby is error reporting. While we could constantly monitor the logs explorer for new errors, those same errors will appear automatically in error reporting. Google detects errors in our application logs automatically, we don't even need to do anything special in our source code for this to work. We can then get a sense of when and how frequently these errors occur, set up notifications to alert us of new errors, and link these reports to a bug-tracking or help-desk system if we are using one.

Setting budget alerts. One last very important reporting tool we should look at is buried away in the building settings under budgets and alerts. It can be very easy to rack up unexpected costs on Cloud-based deployments, especially when those deployments span many different services and resources across the platform. It could turn out you have some unexpectedly-expensive operations in your application or perhaps your application doesn't scale up very efficiently under load. Instead of discovering this the hard way when we are hit with that big bill, we can set budget limits for our expected operating costs and get an alert when these limits are exceeded. We can set these budget limits for the entire account, on a specific project, or more granularly for individual services on a project. Then we can define threshold levels where we'll be alerted when we're nearing our budget limits so we can investigate the source of the increased expense right away.