As a cloud administrator, you are in charge of monitoring your infrastructure. As you start your operations in Google Cloud, you should be able to collect data from your resources—such as logs and metrics—establish alerts, and visualize the data on a dashboard.

Some of your concerns are:

• How can you set up a monitor over your deployed resource?
• How can you configure the metrics to read over the network traffic?
• How can you create an alert policy for your metrics?
• How can you visualize your metrics on a dashboard?

The CloudWatch workflow is described in the following diagram.

In Amazon Web Services (AWS), you install the Amazon CloudWatch Agent on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances to collect metrics and logs from your applications and infrastructure. You configure logs and log groups to collect log data from your resources by using Amazon CloudWatch. You can even configure one or more custom metrics to monitor any specific aspects of your infrastructure.

Finally, you create one or more alarms to monitor and notify the administrators in response to events.

Now you will explore how you can monitor your infrastructure in Google Cloud.

Overview

In this lab you will create a compute engine to install and configure an Ops Agent. You will generate traffic and view metrics on the predefined Apache dashboard and also create an alerting policy.

Objectives

In this lab, you learn how to perform the following tasks:

• Create a Compute Engine VM instance.
• Install an Apache Web Server.
• Install and configure the Ops Agent for the Apache Web Server.
• Generate traffic and view metrics on the predefined Apache dashboard.
• Create an alerting policy.

Create a Compute Engine VM instance

1. In Google Cloud console, go to Compute and then select Compute Engine.

2. To create a VM instance, click Create instance.

3. Fill in the fields for your instance as follows:

• In the Name field, enter quickstart-vm.
• In the Region select and in Zone select
• In the Machine type field, select e2-small.
• Ensure the Boot disk is configured for Debian GNU/Linux 11 (bulleye).
• In the Firewall field, select both Allow HTTP traffic and Allow HTTPS traffic.

Leave the rest of the fields at their default values.

4. Click Create. When your VM is ready, it appears in the list of instances in the Instances tab.

Click Check my progress to verify the objective.

Create a Compute Engine VM instance

Install an Apache Web Server

To deploy an Apache Web Server on your Compute Engine VM instance, do the following:

1. To open a terminal to your instance, in the Connect column, click SSH.

2. To update the package lists on your instance, run the following command:

sudo apt-get update

3. To install an Apache2 HTTP Server, run the following command:

sudo apt-get install apache2 php7.0 Note: Note: If the previous command fails, then use sudo apt-get install apache2 php. If asked to continue the installation, enter Y.

4. Open your browser and connect to your Apache2 HTTP server by using the URL http://EXTERNAL_IP, where EXTERNAL_IP is the external IP address of your VM. You can find this address in the External IP column of your VM instance.

Click Check my progress to verify the objective.

Install an Apache Web Server

Install and configure the Ops Agent

To collect logs and metrics from your Apache Web Server, install the Ops Agent by using the terminal:

1. To open a terminal to your VM instance, in the Connect column, click SSH.

2. To install the Ops Agent, run the following command:

curl -sSO https://dl.google.com/cloudagents/add-google-cloud-ops-agent-repo.sh sudo bash add-google-cloud-ops-agent-repo.sh --also-install

You see google-cloud-ops-agent installation succeeded.

3. Copy the following command, then paste it into the terminal:

# Configures Ops Agent to collect telemetry from the app and restart Ops Agent. set -e # Create a back up of the existing file so existing configurations are not lost. sudo cp /etc/google-cloud-ops-agent/config.yaml /etc/google-cloud-ops-agent/config.yaml.bak # Configure the Ops Agent. sudo tee /etc/google-cloud-ops-agent/config.yaml > /dev/null << EOF metrics: receivers: apache: type: apache service: pipelines: apache: receivers: - apache logging: receivers: apache_access: type: apache_access apache_error: type: apache_error service: pipelines: apache: receivers: - apache_access - apache_error EOF sudo service google-cloud-ops-agent restart sleep 60

The previous command creates the configuration to collect and ingest logs and metrics from the Apache Web Server. For more information about ingesting logs from the Apache Web Server, see Configure the Ops Agent for Apache Web Server.

Click Check my progress to verify the objective.

Install the Ops Agent

Generate traffic and view metrics

Monitoring dashboards let you view and analyze metrics related to your services. In this quickstart, you generate metrics on your Apache Web Server and view metric data on the automatically created Apache GCE Overview dashboard.

To generate metrics on your Apache Web Server, do the following:

1. In the Google Cloud console, go to Compute Engine.

2. In the Connect column, click SSH to open a terminal to your VM instance.

3. To generate traffic on your Apache Web Server, run the following command:

timeout 120 bash -c -- 'while true; do curl localhost; sleep $((RANDOM % 4)) ; done'

The previous command generates traffic by making a request to the Apache Web Server every four seconds.

To view the Apache Overview dashboard, do the following:

1. In the Google Cloud console, search for Monitoring in the top search bar and navigate to the Monitoring service.

2. In the navigation pane, select Dashboards.

3. In All Dashboards, select the Apache GCE Overview dashboard. The dashboard opens.

In the dashboard, there are several charts that contain information about your Apache and Compute Engine integration:

Create an alerting policy

1. To set up an email notification channel, do the following:

• In the Google Cloud console > Monitoring select Alerting and then click Edit notification channels.
• In the Email section, click Add new and enter your desired Email Address.
• Name the Email Channel: An email address you have access to

To create an alerting policy that monitors a metric and sends an email notification when the traffic rate on your Apache Web Server exceeds 4 KiB/s, do the following:

2. In the Google Cloud console > Monitoring select Alerting and then click Create policy.

3. Select the time series to be monitored:

• Click Select a metric and enter VM instance into the filter bar.
• In the Active metric categories list, select Apache.
• In the Active metrics list, select workload/apache.traffic.

The chart for Apache traffic is shown.

4. In the Transform data section, select the following values:

• Rolling window: 1 min
• Rolling window function: rate

5. In the Configure alert trigger section, select the following values and click Next:

• Alert trigger: Any time series violations
• Threshold position: Above threshold
• Threshold value: 4000

6. In the Configure notifications and finalize alert section, select the following values:

• Notification channels: An email address you have access to
• Incident autoclose duration: 30 min
• Name the alert policy: Apache traffic above threshold

7. Click Create policy. Your alerting policy is now active.

Click Check my progress to verify the objective.

Create an alerting policy

Test the alerting policy

To test the alerting policy you just created, do the following:

1. Navigate to Cloud Console > Compute Engine.

2. In the Connect column, click SSH to open a terminal to your VM instance.

3. In the terminal, enter the following command:

timeout 120 bash -c -- 'while true; do curl localhost; sleep $((RANDOM % 4)) ; done'

The previous command generates traffic in your Apache Web Server.

After the traffic rate threshold value of 4 KiB/s is exceeded in your Apache Web Server, an email notification is sent. It might take several minutes for this process to complete.

The email notification you receive looks similar to the following:

Congratulations!

In this lab, you learned how to install Ops Agent on a VM and use it to set an alerting policy to notify a recipient of potential issues with the instance.

Google Ops Agent and Amazon CloudWatch Agent are both monitoring agents that allow you to collect metrics and logs from your application and infrastructure in the cloud. This information, in turn, enables users to monitor the health and performance of applications and infrastructure in the cloud. Here are some similarities and differences between the two services:

Similarities:

• Both Ops Agent and Cloudwatch Agent allow users to collect logs and metrics from a virtual machine instance.
• Both OpsAgent and Cloudwatch Agent can be installed through a remote connection to the virtual machine (VM) or through the corresponding command-line interface (CLI).
• After you have installed the agent on your VM, the host metrics, process metrics, and logs will automatically be routed to the monitoring service (Cloud Logging and Cloud Monitoring in Google Cloud and Amazon CloudWatch in AWS) without user intervention.
• Once the data is collected in Cloud Logging and Cloud Monitoring or CloudWatch, you can visualize it in a centralized dashboard by using the corresponding console (Cloud Console for Google Cloud and Amazon Management Console for AWS).

Differences:

• Just like in AWS, you also create a configuration file for Ops Agent to log metrics. In AWS, this configuration file is in JSON format, whereas in Google Cloud, a default YAML-based unified configuration is used.
• In Google Cloud, you create an alerting policy to get notified in response to an event, while in AWS, you use alarms. In AWS, the alarms need the integration of a notification service—such as Simple Notification Service, Simple Queue Service, or Simple Email Service—into CloudWatch to get notified in response to an event. Whereas, in Google Cloud, the notification service is integrated within the alerting policy.
• After the OpsAgent or CloudWatch Agent is installed, logs and metrics are automatically routed to the monitoring service. Google Cloud has two dedicated monitoring services: Cloud Logging for logs and Cloud Monitoring for metrics. Whereas in AWS, the functionality of both services is combined in Amazon CloudWatch.

End your lab

When you have completed your lab, click End Lab. Google Cloud Skills Boost removes the resources you’ve used and cleans the account for you.

You will be given an opportunity to rate the lab experience. Select the applicable number of stars, type a comment, and then click Submit.

The number of stars indicates the following:

• 1 star = Very dissatisfied
• 2 stars = Dissatisfied
• 3 stars = Neutral
• 4 stars = Satisfied
• 5 stars = Very satisfied

You can close the dialog box if you don't want to provide feedback.

For feedback, suggestions, or corrections, please use the Support tab.

Copyright 2022 Google LLC All rights reserved. Google and the Google logo are trademarks of Google LLC. All other company and product names may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated.