Monitoring Google Cloud Platform (GCP)

To provide visibility and insights of Google Cloud Platform cloud-based environments, you can use Instana host agent to automatically discover and monitors GCP services by:

  • Providing real-time insights into metadata, configuration, and metrics.
  • Monitor the health of each service and configure alerts for issues that might occur.

To remotely monitor GCP in a Kubernetes or Red Hat OpenShift cluster, do not install the Instana host agent on each node of the cluster. Install the host agent on a dedicated host machine.

Installing Instana host agent

Instana agent can be installed in multiple hosts. For more information, see Installing host agents.

Platforms

Monitored services

Installation

The Instana Google Cloud integration uses Service Accounts to create an API connection between Google Cloud and Instana.

Depending on the number of monitored entities in your cloud environment, you might need to increase the maximum amount of available memory to your host agent.{: note} Agent memory can be increased by setting the environment variable AGENT_MAX_MEM to a value that is greater than the default value of 512 MB. For example, to set the agent memory to 1 GB, you can set AGENT_MAX_MEM=1024mb.

The following steps are instructions for creating the service account and providing Instana with the service account credentials to begin making API calls on your behalf.

  1. Access the Google Cloud credentials page for the Google Cloud project for which you want to set up the Instana integration.

  2. Click CREATE CREDENTIALS > Service account.

    SelectServiceAccount

  3. In the Create Service account page, enter a unique name for the service account, and click CREATE AND CONTINUE.

  4. Select a role from the list or create a custom one. You need to have at least the following permissions:

    • monitoring.timeSeries.list
    • pubsub.subscriptions.list
    • pubsub.topics.list
    • resourcemanager.projects.get
    • cloudsql.instances.list
    • storage.buckets.list

    To create a custom role, complete the following steps:

    1. From the navigation menu, click Roles > CREATE ROLE.
    2. Enter the title of the role, and click ADD PERMISSIONS.

    gcprolecreation

    1. Add the basic permissions that are mentioned previously, which are required for the role, and click CREATE.

  5. Select the account you created from the list of service accounts.

  6. Select the KEYS tab, and click ADD KEY.

  7. Select Create new key and select the key type as JSON, and then click CREATE.

    serviceaccountkey

    You need to record the location of the credential file where it is saved to complete the integration.

  8. Add a field credentials_path to the configuration.yml file with the path to the credentials file. See the following example:

    com.instana.plugin.gcp:
  poll_rate: 60 # How often Google's monitoring API is polled in seconds
  credentials_path: '/opt/instana/credentials/cred-gcp.json' # Path to Service Account credentials
  exclude_tags: ''
  include_tags: ''

To monitor projects, the following services need to be enabled: