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Monitoring in the Google Cloud Platform
Cloud Gazer
When you are responsible for infrastructure and applications, monitoring is a must-have for gaining insights into the status of the components involved, not only for on-premises environments but also for the public cloud. The Google Cloud Platform (GCP) discussed in this article, along with AWS and Microsoft Azure, is one of the three major public clouds.
In recent years, Google has seen considerable growth, especially in the areas of machine learning and big data. However, GCP is also very much in the running in the classic Internet-as-a-Service (IaaS) arena. Monitoring is definitive for the admin's ability to operate a cloud infrastructure effectively. At Google, the Cloud Operations Suite, which addresses the topics of monitoring, logging, tracing, debugging, profiling, and auditing, was named Stackdriver until two years ago. Google no longer uses this name and simply refers to it as the Operations Suite.
To ensure that monitoring works during operations, you need to field the data from the source systems in the form of signals. In the monitoring world, data is equivalent to metrics, which can come from IaaS components such as virtual machines, from added-value services such as managed databases, from platforms such as Kubernetes, and from microservices – but also from the applications themselves. Keeping track of incidents is essential, whether in the form of alerts, error reports, or even service-level objectives. The Operations Suite lets you consolidate and view the data in more detail, visualize the results, and use them for troubleshooting.
Access to monitoring data on GCP can be both centralized and decentralized. In the Google Cloud, all resources are assigned to projects. In Operations Suite, each project can collect and analyze data on its own. However, if you want to keep track of all systems across the entire organization, you need to add multiple projects to a monitoring workspace.
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