Google Cloud Platform (GCP), a suite of cloud computing services offered by Google, launched in 2008. It is a powerful cloud platform that offers Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service, and serverless computing environments. Many companies are now using GCP to build, modernize, and scale their businesses.
GCP monitoring with Applications Manager
Monitoring GCP service instances can be pretty challenging. Most admins face the following challenges while monitoring Google Cloud Platform performance:
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Limited visibility into hybrid infrastructure:
Your cloud infrastructure might include a number of different elements, and it is virtually impossible to manage and monitor each of them individually. -
Difficulty managing cloud storage:
Cloud storage is a crucial aspect of all cloud infrastructures. When cloud storage is not managed well, it can affect the functioning of your applications. Monitoring your cloud storage can help you better plan your resources’ capacity needs. -
Inability to diagnose the root cause of issues:
In a cloud suite like GCP, it is difficult to ascertain what caused an outage and the impact the outage might have on the functioning of other resources. A typical organization’s cloud infrastructure contains a huge number of instances that perform business-critical operations that are critical to the smooth functioning of applications. When an application becomes unavailable, it may be due to a slow network, failure of a particular resource in the cloud infrastructure, or something else. Since the cloud infrastructure might have a huge number of resources, it could be difficult to isolate the instance that caused an outage or pinpoint the cause of its failure.
Although Google provides some lightweight Google Cloud Platform monitoring monitoring tools such as Stackdriver and gcloud, you may want to use a dedicated monitoring system like Applications Manager to get a clearer picture of GCP operations. Applications Manager offers proactive GCP monitoring that gives deep visibility into your Google Compute Engine, Google Cloud Filestore, and Google Cloud Storage instances to help you find and fix issues before they overwhelm your applications. It also improves your visibility into the performance of these instances, enabling you to optimize application performance and contribute to a smooth end-user experience. You can correlate your GCP metrics with metrics from the rest of your hybrid cloud environment as well as retain data for longer periods of time for long-term monitoring and trend analysis.
Google Compute Engine
Compute Engine, Google’s IaaS virtual machine (VM) offering, allows clients to run workloads on Google’s physical hardware. Compute Engine facilitates the creation of general purpose VMs that are scalable and serve as large compute clusters. It also provides custom VMs that makes it easy to pick VMs closest to your on-site infrastructure, making it cost-effective to accelerate the process of workload migration.
Applications Manager allows you to add a GCP monitor that automatically discovers VM instances in the GCP console. It also provides various options to start, stop, delete, or manage VM instances as and when required. 
With Applications Manager’s GCP monitoring, you can monitor and collect data on key metrics for the discovered Compute Engine instances, such as CPU usage, disk I/O, and memory utilization. This helps you optimize the performance of these instances and avoid performance bottlenecks.
Persistent Disk is Google’s local storage service, and it is fully integrated with GCP products, Compute Engine, and Google Kubernetes Engine. Compute Engine persistent disks have bursting, which allows IOs through at a rate that exceeds the advertised limits. After the initial burst is exhausted, the IOs will be rate-limited (throttled). Throttling is intended to smooth out bursty IOs. With throttling, bursty IOs can be spread over a period of time such that the performance limits of your disk can be met but not exceeded at any given instant.
With Applications Manager’s capabilities as a GCP software, you get several metrics that are useful for understanding if and when your disks are being throttled. Zero bytes in throttled read operations means that your workload never reached the point where the IOs were rate-limited. Any value other than zero means there was a burst of IO that exceeded the burst allowance and the persistent disk entered rate-limiting mode.
Applications Manager also offers visibility into your network’s status and helps you understand performance trends. You can keep track of firewall metrics such as the incoming bytes dropped and the number of packets dropped due to a firewall policy. This will help you diagnose network configuration issues as well as identify potential attacks against your infrastructure.
Applications Manager tracks quota limits to measure resource consumption over time, prevents unforeseen spikes in usage, and anticipates and resolves potential issues before end users are affected.
Google Cloud Filestore
Cloud Filestore is an all-inclusive managed file storage service for applications that demand a file system interface and a shared file system for data. It enables you to set up your NAS systems with instances of Compute Engine and Kubernetes Engine. Cloud Filestore monitoring software can help you optimize the performance of your file-based workloads by monitoring the performance and capacity independently.
Applications Manager offers dedicated Cloud Filestore monitoring to help you optimize the performance of your filestore operations. It keeps an eye on your storage utilization and notifies you if the storage is about to run out. This information can give you a heads-up that you need to scale your storage. Applications Manager also tracks various disk metrics, such as I/O throughput (Read Throughput and Write Throughput), I/O ops (Read Ops and Write Ops), and I/O latency (Read Latency and Write Latency), to identify areas of slow performance. 
In GCP, you’re charged based on the number of procedure calls you use. Applications Manager helps you track the number of procedure calls in your filestore. This helps you manage procedure calls that don’t necessarily need to be running.
Google Cloud Storage
Cloud Storage is a service within GCP that offers object storage for live or archived data. It is a scalable IaaS solution that offers state-of-the-art security and sharing capabilities for enterprises.
Cloud Storage provides buckets to store objects. These objects can be accessed by their own methods. Applications Manager offers comprehensive Cloud Storage monitoring that monitors buckets and the total number of objects in Cloud Storage to ensure optimal performance of your applications. It also gives you insights into network requests, helping you identify the load on your Cloud Storage instance. Applications Manager’s capabilities as a GCP tool includes helping you gain visibility into traffic statistics so you can administer your storage data well.
A storage instance services various requests. Closely monitoring the number of requests can help you attend to operational issues quickly. Applications Manager monitors various read and write request parameters, such as Get Object Requests/Min, Get Bucket Requests/Min, and Update Object Requests/Min, giving you detailed information about the number of requests in your instance and enabling you to analyze the overall performance of your storage.
Start monitoring GCP in a few minutes
If you are already using Applications Manager, you can start monitoring GCP by adding it as a monitor. Otherwise, you can sign up for a free trial and immediately start monitoring your Compute Engine, Cloud Filestore, and Cloud Storage instances alongside other servers and services.
