The popularity of Google Cloud Platform (GCP) as a public cloud service continues to grow. In response to increasing demand from Wavefront customers, we are excited to announce the addition of a Wavefront integration with GCP – the Wavefront GCP Monitoring Suite. It’s now included in the Wavefront cloud-based monitoring service and our free trial.
The Wavefront GCP Monitoring Suite collects, analyzes, and visualizes key metrics from Google Compute Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, and other Google Cloud services. It delivers out-of-the-box metric-driven visibility into critical cloud performance and usage metrics. Of course with Wavefront, you can also monitor your applications that are running on Google Cloud as well. In this first blog of my two-part series, I will introduce the key advantages of using Wavefront to monitor Google Cloud and for getting deeper insight into the Google Compute Engine. In my next blog, I will cover how to use Wavefront to analyze the Google Kubernetes Engine.
Why Developers and DevOps Teams Use the Wavefront GCP Monitoring Suite?
Wavefront’s GCP Monitoring Suite delivers immediate value to developers and DevOps teams by enabling them to focus on running, building, and accelerating delivery of new custom cloud applications. With Wavefront, teams can collect top-level cloud service operation metrics, custom code development metrics, and underlying Google Cloud infrastructure metrics in one centralized location — at full granularity with unlimited data retention.
Wavefront’s prebuilt free dashboards help engineers to:
- Isolate cloud infrastructure bottlenecks using Wavefront prebuilt dashboards to visualize in real-time all GCP performance metrics
- Troubleshoot quicker and get fast answers to any question by running analytics on Wavefront’s GCP Cloud metrics using the powerful Wavefront Query Language
- Tag and group Google cloud metrics such as GCE, GKE or any container metrics across any dimension, including cloud regions and zones to understand geo performance, from top-level service KPIs, down to individual hosts or containers
- Correlate Google Cloud metrics with important external events such as configuration changes, or build/deploy events for appropriate cloud capacity planning and visibility
- Collaborate and share Google cloud performance and resource utilization across all teams using Wavefront’s PagerDuty, HipChat or Slack integrations
Critical Google Compute Health Insights
At-a-glance NOC-style GCE dashboards provide real-time visibility, health, and performance of all relevant compute components, with quick navigation into health and usage of individual hosts. With constant visibility into cloud resource utilization correlated with top services, DevOps and developer teams can roll out quality releases faster, detect any underlying infrastructure performance anomalies, and alert on and remediate any infrastructure bottlenecks before their SaaS service is affected.
The Wavefront GCP Monitoring Suite delivers important metrics across compute, storage and networking elements (on top of your custom and standard application metrics):
CPU Resource Utilization Metrics
Compute resource metrics help engineers appropriately plan their underlying CPU resources and easily track utilization of compute engine. Dynamically scaling compute resources is one of the key advantages of using Google Cloud Platform. By creating Wavefront alerts when CPU utilization is reaching a critical threshold, DevOps engineers can proactively and economically manage their cloud compute resources. Metrics collected and analyzed include:
- The total number of active and reserved CPU cores
- Top 10 hosts by CPU utilization
- Top 10 hosts by network throughput
Critical Storage Metrics
The performance of cloud storage directly impacts cloud service performance and availability. Not only is it important to understand the health of individual volumes, but also to understand overall storage performance and correlate them with custom application metrics (which Wavefront collects using a variety of open source code libraries). Wavefront delivers visibility into the most important storage metrics including:
- Overall Storage IOPS
- Top 10 Volumes by Disk Read/Writes
- Volume Read/Write Ops
- Throttled Volumes by Disk
Key Networking Metrics
Decreased network throughput can dramatically slow down your cloud service, especially when you are scaling your cloud application. Wavefront’s Google Cloud networking metrics help you instantly pinpoint rising network bandwidth throughput at any scale, set custom network performance baselines, and proactively alert on any usage level. It helps you trend on critical low-level networking metrics such as:
- The overall networking throughput
- Top 10 hosts by ingress or egress traffic
- Dropped packets by firewall
I hope you found this post worthwhile and learned something new about the capabilities of the Wavefront GCP Monitoring Suite. In my next post, I will be sharing how to use Wavefront to monitor the Google Kubernetes Engine. Until then, sign-up for a free Wavefront trial where you can test drive the Wavefront GCP Monitoring Suite, add your own GCP metrics, and application metrics too.
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