Google Cloud operations suite (formerly Stackdriver) monitors, troubleshoots and can be used to help improve application performance across your organization’s Google Cloud environment.
It features Cloud Monitoring and Cloud Logging, plus error reporting and debugging and tracing and works across multiple cloud environments. Let’s take a deeper look at this service in our latest installment of GCP 101.
What is Google Cloud Operations Suite?
This offering equips your organization with valuable insight into your cloud infrastructure and apps, revealing data about their health, performance and availability so that you can quickly identify, troubleshoot and repair issues.
The operations suite integrates with Google Cloud Platform but also reaches outside of the Google universe; it works with Amazon Web Services and popular open-source packages, as well.
Whether you are on dedicated GCP infrastructure or use multi-cloud architecture, Google Cloud operations suite combines all of the metrics, logs and metadata from these accounts into a single-view dashboard of your cloud environment. It also integrates with a growing ecosystem of technology integrations to expand the IT ops, security, and compliance capabilities, including Slack.
This integration and the single-source view allow your IT team to understand not just your infrastructure platform but also your virtual machines, containers, middleware and applications tiers, for simple, traceable monitoring updates.
How Do Google Cloud Monitoring and Cloud Logging Work?
These two services deliver what Google Cloud calls “out-of-the-box observability.” Cloud Monitoring provides proactive, full-stack monitoring for system health and performance by “ingesting” all of the data from your organization’s infrastructure and apps.
It uses this information to generate custom, flexible dashboards and charts for rich visualization and manages alerts/notifications to keep you updated on environment health and performance. This service also offers service-level-objective (SLO) monitoring and uptime checks.
Because Cloud Monitoring provides an integrated service for metrics, dashboards, uptime monitoring and alerting, you’ll spend less time maintaining multiple systems. This means you can pay closer attention to anomaly reporting, pattern detection, and exhaustion prediction and get insights into longer-term trends that demand attention.
Cloud Logging, a fully-managed service, allows you to store, search, analyze, monitor and set alerts on logging data and events from your Google Cloud environment. This includes application and system log data, custom log data from Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) environments, virtual machines (VMs) and Google Cloud services.
Google Cloud operations suite also offers Application Performance Management (APM). This combines the power of both Cloud Monitoring and Cloud Logging with three other services — Cloud Trace, Cloud Debugger and Cloud Profiler. This gives you the ability to reduce latency and improve app performance.
What Are the Benefits of Using Google Cloud Operations Suite?
These combined services give you all the knowledge you need to analyze and troubleshoot issues and quickly resolve them.
You also can gain real-time insights into your cloud environment. For example, pair Cloud Logging with Google Cloud’s BigQuery, a scalable, enterprise data warehouse, to use log-based metrics and analysis to create Cloud Monitoring dashboards. It puts your data pipeline to work for you.
