AWS Knowledge
Effective Tools for Google Cloud Platform Monitoring
Piyush Kalra
Oct 9, 2024
In cloud computing, GCP is the most easily grasped of the evolving cloud utility model bestselling. It is one thing to deploy resources but to monitor them is another task altogether, and this task is equally important. It is critical to manage performance, security, and costs to an acceptable level while ensuring that your infrastructure does not go down, and this is why there is GCP monitoring in the first place.
Managing your operations can be very much influenced by the tools at your disposal. Whether you are in the shoes of a cloud developer, a DevOps member, or a founder in control of cloud operations, knowing how to navigate GCP monitoring will be crucial. This post will focus on GCP monitoring from a practical standpoint and provide examples of useful tools, focusing on addressing the GCP monitoring challenge and thereby progressing the cloud optimization efforts by as much as 50%.
Understanding GCP Monitoring
What is GCP Monitoring?
Google Cloud Platform Monitoring entails the measuring and analysis of various metrics, events, and other metadata that come from your cloud setup. Observability data was useful in enabling organizations to view the performance of their infrastructure, analyze threats and take actionable insights to mitigate them. What you can do with Google Cloud Monitoring is view a variety of performance metrics & logs which helps you see how your cloud environment is functioning. We have also covered an article about Monitoring and Optimizing.
Why Monitor Your Google Cloud?
There are many reasons why monitoring your Google Cloud is important:
Optimal Resource Utilization: Monitoring resource usage ensures that your virtual machines, databases, and services are running appropriately thereby avoiding unnecessary over-provisioning which saves costs.
Cost Management: A good monitoring system provides the areas where unnecessary expenditures are being incurred, thereby increasing performance within the given costs.
Enhancing Security and Compliance: Security risks are faced every day, and continuous monitoring will enable such risks to be addressed before it is too late and the damage is done.
Native Google Cloud Monitoring Tools
Overview of Google Cloud’s Observability
(Image Source: Google Cloud)
Formerly known as Stackdriver, the Google Cloud’s Observability consists of tools such as Cloud Monitoring, Cloud Logging, Cloud Audit Logs, Cloud Trace, Cloud Debugger, Cloud Profiler which include central integration of these from more than just the Google Cloud Platform.
This suite retrieves metrics, traces, events and other kinds of metadata from outside GCP and also from AWS, app instrumentation, uptime probes and even services such as Prometheus, Cassandra, Elastisearch, Nginx etc. It doesn't just include the gathering of performance metrics, which provides high-level insights into environments managed, outlines how shepherding architectural designing of monitoring and management is completed, including the real-time logging of those operations.
Cloud Monitoring Features
Metrics Collection: Obtain the relevant performance metrics from GCP services and AWS EC2 covering all the resources used in the systems cross-cloud services. Keep in check CPU usage to prevent overload or wastage of capacity, watch out for the memory used by the applications, so that they operate within the prescribed limits, and monitor the disks I/O to see if there are any performance degradation hitches.
Visualization Capabilities: Employ the graphs and dashboards from the GCO platform to track the performance of the data, spot trends and anomalies and draw insights to enable decisions to be made early rather than late in the day.
Alert Configuration: Notify your team once any set threshold limits are breached to forestall the problem from ever arising or to enable the problem to be dealt with in the shortest time possible.
Additional Tools and Features
Google Cloud Logging: Helps collect and store the logs of Google Cloud services and applications as well as providing visibility into the logs for troubleshooting purposes
Google Cloud Trace: Helps perform synchronous tracing to see latency issues when making requests and analyze their performance to discover any potential problems.
Google Cloud Profiler: Looks into the use of applications on a constant basis which in the long run aids in ways that led to the largest CPU or memory usage that ought to be reduced.
Benefits and Limitations of Using Native Tools
Although native tools are adequately glued into the GCP service delivered in a monitoring fashion, their pulling user’s comprehensive features may not be realized to the required level in a distributed multi-cloud set up. Another source of third-party bindings, such as BindPlane, offers the only context that can help by pulling data from many components of the applications, their on-premises and hybrid cloud environments, their white paper describes.
Third-Party GCP Monitoring Tools
Importance of Third-Party Solutions
External monitoring tools help fill the gaps of the native tools in GCP by providing multi-cloud, advanced analytics and dashboarding features which are missing in the built-in tools. They further enhance native limitations where more advanced monitoring requirements of larger organizations are present.
Top Third-Party Tools for GCP Monitoring
Datadog
Datadog also enables complete observability on an entire GCP environment by aggregating Hosts and Services GCP data. GCP unit has a Service Map which visualizes the relationship between databases, APIs and GCP containers with the possibility of tracking the flow of data from on premise systems towards GCP or multi-cloud environments.
Datadog attaches itself to services like Google Cloud Run enabling it to access real time data while automatically scaling up with GCP resource elements that are newly introduced. It also supports deployment and configuration of new clusters, hosts, and application resources using Google Cloud Deployment Manager, Ansible, and other management tools. With more than 750+ integrations available in the market, the teams can easily attach Datadog to the existing workflows.
New Relic
New Relic is a tool that helps in understanding and managing metrics, logs, events and traces of observability data in the GCP environments. Expect a monitoring service with tools to monitor a system’s operational health covering its infrastructure, cloud applications, digital customer experiences up to 21 GCP services. With New Relic, it’s smart enough to understand and recognize anomalies, patterns, and decrease the noise hence improving intelligent sense, escalate, and solve the incidents. New Relic has more than 470 integrations and makes it easy to collect, store and protect your telemetry. It also allows deployment of existing open source tools without any complicated additional infrastructure.
Full Stack Visibility: From the layers of infrastructure and applications, to browser and mobile applications, manage and improve the technology stack as a whole.
Built to Scale: The only software as a service infrastructure that is 100% multi-tenant pure cloud environment that everybody can deploy. And with no hardware to deal with, you will certainly realize better returns in your investment while lowering TCO.
Real-time Analytics for Everyone: Actionable and aesthetically stunning dashboards that are designed for development, operations and management teams delivering insights in no time.
Prometheus
One of most widely used open source monitoring applications is Prometheus owing primarily to its dimensional data model, query language PromQL and robust storage. It allows you to configure precise alerts and is easily integrated into Grafana. Google Cloud Managed Service for Prometheus is a solution that enables users to monitor and alert clouds without manually operating Global M as well as Global A. It works with Google Kubernetes Engine, VMs, serverless workloads, and retains data for 2 years.
Most important features include:
Dimensional data modeling and PromQL querying
Easy integration with Grafana
Broad support of client libraries
Availability of Cloud Monitoring with access of more than 6500+ free metrics
24-month data storage
Compatibility with various workloads
Global monitoring and alerting
Google Cloud's managed, multi-cloud solution
Grafana
One of the reasons many people also love this tool is because of its excellent capabilities in visualization and alerting. This tool also connects with a plethora of data sources making it possible to easily generate interactive and rich dashboards. Grafana Cloud elevates this aspect further by stating that it deals out a highly managed observatory platform that combines Prometheus metrics , logs , traces among others. Since it is hosted on Grafana Labs’ cloud, which runs on their scalable open-source software, clients are able to connect 100+ other external data sources and tools for testing performance and incident management while on Grafana Cloud.
These include other systems within the Google Cloud platform for monitoring via Grafana Cloud for GCP allowing integrations from other peripheral systems enhancing observability in the tool with click through processes and dashboards already developed. This allows the users to avoid the rigours of dealing with infrastructure management and concentrate on deriving actionable information.
Sematext
Sematext Cloud allows you to monitor your Google Cloud infrastructure in real time: metrics, logs, traces and user activity performance are tracked. It includes APM, database, network and synthetic user monitoring insights for K8s, Docker Swarm and Docker. Lagging features, such as automated alerts or log management improve its functioning.
Key Features:
Over 100 integrations for event and metric collection.
Preconfigured dashboards for key metrics.
Easy to configure service with auto discovery feature.
Custom dashboards and metric tracking.
Splunk
Splunk and Google Cloud made this shift enthusiastically in order to improve cloud monitoring with greater agility, cost efficiency and time-to-market. Cloud threats can be detected more professionally thanks to Splunk Enterprise Security’s next generation SIEM that includes 12 cloud security stories and 49 detection rules for Google Cloud and Kubernetes. Moreover, to enhance the Quick response, the Splunk SOAR provides playbooks for Google Cloud tools such as Compute Engine and Cloud Storage.
They have a partnership with Chrome that allows event security in the managed Chrome browser’s work with Chrome risk event detection. Also, Splunk allows users to watch the Google Cloud metrics and logs in real time without any performance issues to its users and follows open-source approaches of data instrumentation including OpenTelemetry. Splunk also takes security orchestration to a new level thanks to Phantom Apps for Google Workspace and BigQuery.
Instana
As a monitoring solution for IBM Cloud, Instana is equally native to GCP and captures and identifies application components and requisitions with a single agent. This level of detail in tracing the requests and responses allows for more effective investigation of issues making the system resilient. The platform builds the dynamic dependencies graph which is aimed at demonstrating how any of the dependencies affect other components of the GCP environment. Instana captures observability data every second from GKE containers and microservices which makes the data confident for analysis and action. It also provides monitoring services for AWS, Azure, and IBM.
Key Features
Full-Stack APM: Because it provides every form of tracing without sampling, performance concerns for GCP environments are dealt with as a priority before they reach the end user.
Automatic Discovery: Provides graphical representation of application topology for deeper examination in the context of GCP.
Real-Time Monitoring: Notifies IT stakeholders of performance issues experienced on GCP environments within seconds.
Unbounded Analytics: Provides data analysis services for the purpose of cops and infrastructure management systems within GCP.
Root Cause Analysis: Helps determine the effect of services in GCP environments in a timely manner.
Google Cloud Monitoring Best Practices
Establish Clear Objectives
Setting specific measurable goals is necessary in order to assess success. These goals should also be in line with the strategic objectives of your business and assist in enhancing operational and customer satisfaction.
Set Up Automated Alerts
Automated alerts are critical in providing a means of preventing problems before they happen. By equipping the system with triggers of key performance indicators, you can be certain that major problems will be attended to on time.
Regularly Review Monitoring Strategy
As a current trend in technologies dictates, the monitoring strategy needs changing in order to address the modern business challenges and the use of cloud in business. Regular re-evaluations and re-positionings make sure goals are still in line with.
Challenges in GCP Monitoring
Common Mistakes That One Should Be Always Lookout for
It is possible to miss considering third party tools which in their use are beneficial to monitoring practices. In addition to that, ignoring the security features in the monitoring features is a danger to your environment.
Strategies to Overcome Challenges
Chaining systems upstream to foundations monitoring features on other systems will provide the missing pieces of the puzzle and will enhance the system as a whole. There is a need to embrace system monitoring from all the perspectives provided to enhance survivability.
Conclusion
With the right tools and strategies in place, an organization can optimize performance, security, and costs. Evaluate your existing monitoring configuration, learn about the tools discussed, and implement measures that will strengthen every cloud strategy you may have. First of all, be sure to take a trial of the best cloud monitoring tool available and see for yourself how they affect your cloud environment.
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