Category: Database

My interest in observability in Google Cloud developed in large part in the context of working with GCP customers running workloads on GKE, and one of my very first posts here covered using Stackdriver for those workloads. The very first episode of Stack Doctor also went over what were at the time the “new” GKE monitoring capabilities.

Right away, the new GKE monitoring dashboard looks very different from what we saw released at Kubecon in May of 2018.

For example, you can see metrics for a pod by clicking on it, which opens the details panel: From there, click on the Logs tab to get the logs for the pod: If needed — you can filter logs by severity: Click the Open in Logging button: That opens the (new!) Logs Viewer with the query to get those logs pre-populated and executed: One other thing I really like is that you can easily create an Alerting Policy from the Metrics tab of the details screen: If you’ve been following me for a while, you probably know that I don’t necessarily think it’s a good idea to alert on these kinds of infrastructure metrics, but I can absolutely envision a use case where you might need to know about, for example, hitting memory limits or something like that.

Next time, I want to approach this from a different angle by forcing an alert/incident and seeing how useful it’s going to be for troubleshooting.

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