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.

Note: 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.

Platforms

Monitored services

Installation

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

Note: 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. 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, and then select the Service account key.

    SelectServiceAccount

  3. In the Service account list, select the New service account option.

  4. Give the service account a unique name.

  5. Choose a role or create a custom one, which contains at least the following permissions:

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

  6. Select JSON as the key type, and press create.

  7. Take note where this file is saved, as it is needed to complete the integration.

  8. In the host agent configuration file <instana-agent-dir>/etc/instana/configuration.yaml, add a field credentials_path to the com.instana.plugin.gcp section, and designate the value with the path of 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: