hands-on lab

Monitor Compute Engine Resources Through Cloud Monitoring

Intermediate
1h
2,121
4.5/5
Get guided in a real environmentPractice with a step-by-step scenario in a real, provisioned environment.
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Lab description

When you build a cloud infrastructure, you might have anywhere from a small to a large number of resources. Checking the needed parameters for each resource that you have into your cloud environment could become hard. That's where monitoring can help you organize and handle the metrics and checks for your resources. Cloud Monitoring is a Google Cloud service that collects metrics, events, and metadata from your Google Cloud environment. Google Monitoring automatically detects all the resources that you are running into your cloud infrastructure and provides you rich visualization tools to work with. By using Cloud Monitoring, you can create dashboards with metrics that you need, create checks on critical resources, and create alerts triggered when certain events happen. In this lab, you will work in a GCP environment where you will find an existent Compute Engine instance to work with. You will install the Cloud Monitoring agent and then start practicing with Cloud Monitoring. You will create an uptime check and an alert policy triggered when the uptime check fails. You will also create a chart with the CPU metrics of your Compute Engine instance.

Learning Objectives

Upon completion of this lab you will be able to:

  • Create an uptime check for your resources
  • Define an alert policy that will advise you when certain events happen
  • Handle the Cloud Monitoring dashboard to create a chart that will show you the CPU metrics of the instance

Intended Audience

This lab is intended for:

  • Google Cloud Professional Cloud Developer (PCD) certification candidates
  • Google Cloud Associate Cloud Engineer (ACE) certification candidates
  • Solutions architects who want to better understand the core concepts of Cloud Monitoring

Prerequisites

Basic knowledge of Compute Engine instances is a plus but it's not required.

Updates

January 23rd, 2024 - Updated the instructions and screenshots to reflect the latest UI

May 2nd, 2022 - Updated the instructions and screenshots to reflect the latest UI

Environment before
Environment after
About the author
Avatar
Stefano Cascavilla
Junior Data Engineer
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Stefano studies Computer Science and is passionate about technology. He loves working with Cloud services and learning all the best practices for them. Google Cloud Platform and Amazon Web Services are the cloud providers he prefers. He is a Google Cloud Certified Associate Cloud Engineer. Node.js is the programming language he always uses to code. When he's not involved in studying or working, Stefano loves riding his motorbike and exploring new places.

Covered topics
Lab steps
Signing In to the Google Cloud Console
Connecting to the Virtual Machine with a Browser-Based SSH Connection
Installing the Cloud Monitoring Agent
Allowing Traffic to the Compute Engine Instances
Creating the Uptime Check
Creating the Alerting Policy
Testing the Alerting Policy by Stopping the Instance
Monitoring the Compute Engine Instance CPU Usage