Instana’s Automatic Observability, APM and Infrastructure Monitoring platform includes support for automatic Google Compute Engine (GCE) monitoring. Google Compute Engine (GCE) (link resides outside of ibm.com) is one of the most commonly used hosted virtual machine solutions (i.e., IaaS or “Infrastructure As A Service”) on the market. It’s important to include GCE IaaS Monitoring as part of our overall infrastructure and application monitoring.
To help optimize application performance and automate performance management workflows, Instana’s Enterprise Observability Platform goes beyond simple metrics to provide comprehensive correlated Cloud, Infrastructure and Application monitoring capabilities:
- Real-time discovery of dynamic Google Compute Engine instances and deployed services
- Recognition of all GCE Start and Stop Events
- Automatic code instrumentation for 10 different languages, including Java and Ruby monitoring
- Automatic Discovery and mapping of Infrastructure and Application dependencies
- Virtual machine resource and health monitoring
Comprehensive GCE Observability into both Infrastructure and Applications requires performance visibility not only for the virtual host, but also for any additional infrastructure, services and applications deployed onto the virtual machine.
Instana is the quickest and easiest way to monitor the entire stack build around Google Compute Engine to deliver comprehensive application insights. The Instana agent automatically discovers all Google Compute Engine instances and their deployed service technologies, deploys the necessary monitoring sensors and begins tracing applications and requests. Instana also automatically determines the health of the GCE VMs, as well as their services.
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Once deployed, the Instana Agent automatically identifies all running services and applications on the VM – then automatically deploys and configures Instana’s Monitoring sensors. Instana’s curated knowledge base already knows what performance metrics are relevant for collection and how to collect them. To monitor the VM and service health, additional metrics are also collected. Since Instana’s automatic configuration collects all relevant information, monitoring Google Compute Engine VMs couldn’t be easier.
To determine overall service health, the Instana Google Compute Engine Monitoring sensor also collects KPIs on the monitored environment to determine its health status.
With the help of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and health signatures from the curated knowledge base, Instana automatically detects issues with individual Google Compute Engine instances and service incidents. Based on severity, Instana automates incident escalation and root cause identification, helping you solve issues before users are impacted.
Full-stack Application Observability delivers all information (infrastructure, services, applications, traces, etc.) in full context with each other and the end user requests that traverse the environment. In addition to VM and operating system performance and health data, Instana’s Google Compute Engine Monitoring sensor also collects GCE configuration data, allowing Instana to analyze and correlate configuration data and changes with application and service performance information.
All Google Compute Engine performance and configuration information is summarized in a single GCE Monitoring Dashboard, showing all relevant information in a single place for easy problem-solving and performance optimization.
GCE Observability and performance monitoring centers around service metrics and their interactions with other services or data stores. Instana automatically identifies and collects the relevant service metrics for every running service and application in any environment, including multi-cloud and hybrid cloud.
Instana GCE Monitoring includes three types of data; Configuration Data,
Performance Data, Health Signatures:
| Configuration Data |
- InstanceID
- Type
- Availability Zone
- Operating System name and version
- Memory
- Hostname
- Fully qualified domain name
- Network interfaces
| Performance Data |
- CPU Usage
- CPU Usage per Core
- System Load
- Memory Usage
- Filesystem per Device
- Network traffic and errors per Interface
- Process Top List
Health Signatures
- CPU Steal, Usage, Wait
- System Load
- Disk Space saturation
- Memory
Further information on the different sensor information is available in the Instana Google Compute Engine Management Documentation.