Once you’ve deployed applications on GCP, you’ll need to maintain them. Google provides many services to help with that.

One of the most important is the Cloud Operations suite, which was formerly known as Stackdriver. Cloud Monitoring gives you a great overview of what’s happening with all of your resources. By default, it provides graphs showing metrics like CPU utilization, response latency, and network traffic. You can also create your own custom graphs and dashboards. But an even more critical feature is that you can set up alerts to notify you if there are problems. For example, you can set up an uptime check that alerts you if a virtual machine goes down. 

Another useful service in the Cloud Operations suite is Cloud Logging. This is a central place where you can search all of the logs related to your resources, which can be very helpful for troubleshooting.

The suite also includes Error Reporting, Cloud Trace, Cloud Debugger, and Cloud Profiler to debug live applications and track down performance problems.

In addition to monitoring performance, you’ll also need to monitor security and compliance. Security Command Center gathers this information in one place. Its overview dashboard shows you active threats and vulnerabilities, ordered by severity. For example, if one of your applications is vulnerable to cross-site scripting attacks, then that vulnerability will show up in the list. Security Command Center also includes a compliance dashboard that lets you know about violations of compliance standards, such as PCI-DSS, in your GCP environment.

So far in this course, I’ve talked about creating GCP resources manually, but once you’re happy with a particular configuration for a resource, such as a virtual machine, you’ll probably want to create nearly identical resources in a more automated way.

Google’s solution is Cloud Deployment Manager. To use it, you create a configuration file with all the details of the GCP resources you want to create, and then you feed it to Cloud Deployment Manager. What makes it really powerful is that you can define the configuration of multiple, interconnected resources, such as two VM instances and a Cloud SQL database. Then you can deploy all of them at once.

Google has many other management tools as well, but these are the ones you’ll probably use the most often.

And that’s it for management services.