Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

We’ve heard from customers about how important it is to be able to reliably operate your applications and infrastructure running on Google Cloud. In particular, observability is critical to reliable operations. To help you quickly gain insight into your Google Cloud environment, we’ve added 21 new features to Cloud Operations, the observability suite we launched earlier this year, which gives you access to all our operations capabilities directly from the Google Cloud Console.

Logging is a critical component of your cloud infrastructure and provides valuable insight into the performance of your systems and applications. On Google Cloud, Cloud Logging is a service that allows you to store, search, monitor, and alert on log data and events from your Google Cloud Platform (GCP) infrastructure services and your applications. You can view and analyze log data in real time via Logs Viewer, command line or Cloud SDK.

Around the world, operations teams are working to automate their monitoring and alerting workflows, looking to reduce the time they spend on rote operational work (what we call “toil”), so they can spend more time on valuable work. For instance, Google’s Site Reliability Engineering organization aims to keep toil below 50% of an SRE’s time, freeing them up to work on more impactful engineering projects.

Earlier this year, we added a Dashboard API to Cloud Monitoring, allowing you to manage custom dashboards and charts programmatically, in addition to managing them with the Google Cloud Console. Since then, you’ve asked us to provide more sample dashboard templates that target specific Google Cloud services. Many of you have also asked us to provide a Terraform module to help you set up an automated deployment process.

As a cloud project owner, you want your environment to run smoothly and efficiently. At Google Cloud, one of the ways we help you do that is through a family of tools we call Recommenders, which leverage analytics and machine learning to automatically detect issues and present you with optimizations that you can act on.

Logs are an important part of troubleshooting and it’s critical to have them when you need them. When it comes to logging, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) is integrated with Google Cloud’s Logging service. But perhaps you’ve never investigated your GKE logs, or Cloud Logging? Here’s an overview of how logging works in GKE, and how to configure, find, and interact effectively with the GKE logs stored in Cloud Logging.

Editor’s note: This is a follow up to a recent post on how to use Cloud Logging with containerized applications running in Google Kubernetes Engine. In this post, we’ll focus on how DevOps teams can use Cloud Monitoring and Logging to find issues quickly. Running containerized apps on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) is a way for a DevOps team to focus on developing apps, rather than on the operational tasks required to run a secure, scalable and highly available Kubernetes cluster.

Whether you’re a developer debugging an application or on the DevOps team monitoring applications across several production clusters, logs are the lifeblood of the IT organization. And if you run on top of Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), you can use Cloud Logging, one of the many services integrated into GKE, to find that useful information. Cloud Logging, and its companion tool Cloud Monitoring, are full featured products that are both deeply integrated into GKE.

We’ve heard from our customers that you need visibility into metrics and logs from Google Cloud, other clouds, and on-prem in one place. Google Cloud has partnered with Blue Medora to bring you a single solution to save time and money in managing your logs in a single place. Google Cloud’s operations management suite gives you the same scalable core platform that powers all internal and Google Cloud observability.

Monitoring your cloud infrastructure is an essential part of making sure your operations are running smoothly. Since announcing the new Cloud Logging interface in February, we’ve heard from users that the new interface is making it faster and easier to meet logging needs, including troubleshooting issues, verifying deployments, and ensuring compliance. One of those users, Arne Claus, is a site reliability engineer at trivago, and has taken advantage of the new interface already.