hands-on lab

Monitor Compute Engine Resources Through Cloud Monitoring

Difficulty: Intermediate
Duration: Up to 1 hour
Students: 2,402
Rating: 4.5/5
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Description

When you build a cloud infrastructure, you might have anywhere from a small to a large number of resources. Checking the needed parameters for each resource that you have into your cloud environment could become hard. That's where monitoring can help you organize and handle the metrics and checks for your resources. Cloud Monitoring is a Google Cloud service that collects metrics, events, and metadata from your Google Cloud environment. Google Monitoring automatically detects all the resources that you are running into your cloud infrastructure and provides you rich visualization tools to work with. By using Cloud Monitoring, you can create dashboards with metrics that you need, create checks on critical resources, and create alerts triggered when certain events happen. In this lab, you will work in a GCP environment where you will find an existent Compute Engine instance to work with. You will install the Ops Agent and then start practicing with Cloud Monitoring. You will create an uptime check and an alert policy triggered when the uptime check fails. You will also create a chart with the CPU metrics of your Compute Engine instance.

Learning Objectives

Upon completion of this lab you will be able to:

  • Create an uptime check for your resources
  • Define an alert policy that will advise you when certain events happen
  • Handle the Cloud Monitoring dashboard to create a chart that will show you the CPU metrics of the instance

Intended Audience

This lab is intended for:

  • Google Cloud Professional Cloud Developer (PCD) certification candidates
  • Google Cloud Associate Cloud Engineer (ACE) certification candidates
  • Solutions architects who want to better understand the core concepts of Cloud Monitoring

Prerequisites

Basic knowledge of Compute Engine instances is a plus but it's not required.

Updates

May 28th, 2024 - Updated lab to use Debian 12 and Ops Agent

April 29th, 2024 - Resolved command execution issue

January 23rd, 2024 - Updated the instructions and screenshots to reflect the latest UI

May 2nd, 2022 - Updated the instructions and screenshots to reflect the latest UI

Environment before

Environment after

Covered topics

Lab steps

Signing In to the Google Cloud Console
Connecting to the Virtual Machine with a Browser-Based SSH Connection
Installing the Cloud Monitoring Agent
Allowing Traffic to the Compute Engine Instances
Creating the Uptime Check
Creating the Alerting Policy
Testing the Alerting Policy by Stopping the Instance
Monitoring the Compute Engine Instance CPU Usage