Operations Suite

Question 1

What are the 5 primary services that Google Cloud Operations Suite provides?

Answer 1

1. Cloud Logging
2. Cloud Monitoring
3. Cloud Trace
4. Cloud Error Reporting
5. Cloud Profiler

Question 2

What are the 2 main features of Cloud Logging?

Answer 2

1. Log collection and storage
2. Alerts

Question 3

When might you need to use a client library or Ops Agent so that Cloud Logging, Cloud Monitoring, and Cloud Trace can collect telemetry data?

Answer 3

Generally speaking, applications that do not run on GCP can use client libraries and applications that run on Compute Engine instances can use Ops Agent. Keep in mind, other compute services might already integrate this for you automatically. Make sure to check the docs.

Question 4

What is Ops Agent?

Answer 4

Ops Agent is software that collects telemetry from Compute Engine instances. Telemetry meaning: logging, metrics, and trace data.

Question 5

What are the 3 primary components that make up telemetry data?

Answer 5

1. Logs
2. Metrics
3. Traces

Logs are records generated by systems at a specific point in time.

Metrics are quantifiable units of data regarding a system’s health and performance that can be measure over time.

Traces are the paths requests take across a distributed system, including latency.

Question 6

By default, where does Cloud Logging store logs?

Answer 6

In a Cloud Logging bucket (different than Cloud Storage bucket)

Question 7

What are the 4 main features of Cloud Monitoring?

Answer 7

1. Metric collection and storage
2. Alerts
3. Dashboards
4. Synthetic monitors

Question 8

What is the purpose of a synthetic monitor?

Answer 8

The purpose of a synthetic monitor is to test the availability and performance of an application. Essentially, it issues a simulated request to an application over HTTP/HTTPS/TCP and reports whether the request was successful, along with performance metrics.

Cloud Monitoring provides support for synthetic monitors.

Question 9

What are the 2 main features of Cloud Trace?

Answer 9

1. Trace latency collection
2. Trace storage for 30 days

Question 10

What is Cloud Profiler?

Answer 10

Cloud Profiler is software that analyzes CPU and memory usage for applications in production. It can identify the code of an application that is consuming the most resources, giving you insights for further optimization.

Cloud Profiler is different than Cloud Monitoring.

Question 11

How does Cloud Profiler work?

Answer 11

The Cloud Profiler agent must be installed on the VM instance where your application is scheduled to run. Upon startup, the agent must be attached to the application. Once the application starts running, the agent will begin collecting data.

Question 12

Does Google recommend using text logs or structured logs? Why?

Answer 12

Structured logs. This is because structured logs can be queried by fields for analysis.

Question 13

What is a trace composed of?

Answer 13

A trace is composed of 1 or more spans. A span represents the time that it takes to complete a sub operation.

Question 14

In addition to the metrics collected automatically, Cloud Monitoring provides an agent that can be installed to collect more detailed information from Compute Engine VMs, including from third-party apps running on those machines.

Question 15

We also recommend using OpenTelemetry to capture your app-level metrics

Question 16

Health checking is a key responsibility of load balancers.

Question 17

What are the 4 golden signals for monitoring a system?

Answer 17

1. Latency
2. Traffic
3. Errors
4. Saturation