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Introducing the Cloud Monitoring dashboards API

Using dashboards in Cloud Monitoring makes it easy to track critical metrics across time. Dashboards can, for example, provide visualizations to help debug high latency in your application or track key metrics for your applications. Creating dashboards by hand in the Monitoring UI can be a time-consuming process, which may require many iterations. Once dashboards are created, you can save time by using them in multiple Workspaces within your organization.

Today, we’re pleased to announce that the Cloud Monitoring dashboards API is generally available from Google Cloud. The dashboards API lets you read the configuration for existing dashboards, create new dashboards, update existing dashboards and delete dashboards that you no longer use. These methods follow the REST and gRPC semantics and are consistent with other Google Cloud APIs.

A common use case for the dashboards API is to deploy a dashboard developed in one Monitoring Workspace into one or more additional Workspaces. For example, you may have a separate Workspace for your development, QA and production environments (learn more on selecting Workspace structures). In one of the environments, you may have developed a standard operational dashboard that you’d like to use across all your Workspaces. By first reading the dashboard configuration via the projects.dashboards.get method, you can save the dashboard configuration and then use the projects.dashboards.create method to create the same dashboard across the other environments.

How the dashboard API works

When creating a dashboard, you have to specify the layout and the widgets that go inside that layout. A dashboard must use one of three layout types: GridLayout, RowLayout or ColumnLayout.

GridLayout divides the available space into vertical columns of equal width and arranges a set of widgets using a row-first strategy.
RowLayout divides the available space into rows and arranges a set of widgets horizontally in each row.
ColumnLayout divides the available space into vertical columns and arranges a set of widgets vertically in each column.

The widgets available to place inside the layouts include an XyChart, Scorecard and Text object.

XyChart: displays data using X and Y axes. Charts created through the Google Cloud Console are instances of this widget.
Scorecard: displays the latest value of a metric, and how this value relates to one or more thresholds.
Text: displays textual content, either as raw text or a markdown string.

Here’s an example of the JSON dashboard configuration, which specifies a GridLayout with a single XyChart widget. You can see other examples in our sample dashboards and layouts documentation.

Dashboard configuration as a template

A simple approach to building a dashboard configuration is to first create a dashboard in the Cloud Monitoring console, then use the dashboards API projects.dashboards.get method to export the JSON configuration. Then, you can share that configuration as a template either via source control or however you normally share files with your colleagues.

You can try out the dashboard API in the Try this API section of the API documentation, and learn more about managing dashboards by reading the Managing Dashboards documentation. We’re working on features to make the API even more useful, including through the gcloud command line. Also, contributors are discussing and planning the Terraform module for the Monitoring Dashboard API in github.

A special thanks to our colleagues David Batelu, Technical Lead and Joy Wang, Product Manager, Cloud Monitoring, for their contributions to this post.

Your cloud, your infrastructure: Announcing Anthos Ready Storage

We launched Anthos to provide customers with a platform to deliver and manage applications across all types of environments and infrastructure—most commonly, hybrid and multi-cloud environments—leveraging containers and Kubernetes.

To date, we have seen an extremely enthusiastic response from customers who want to run key workloads on Anthos. Our partners are enabling customers to deliver solutions that leverage Anthos in new and exciting ways. This includes storage, which is a key consideration as organizations look to manage their data across hybrid or multi-cloud deployments in containerized environments.

Today, we’re excited to announce a new qualification for partner storage solutions:Anthos Ready Storage. This qualification recognizes partner solutions that have met a core set of requirements to run optimally with Anthos running on-premises, and helps organizations select storage solutions that are deployed with Anthos.

The first set of partners to achieve the Anthos Ready Storage qualification for Anthos on-premise are Dell EMC, HP Enterprise, NetApp, Portworx, Pure Storage, and Robin.io.

All Anthos Ready Storage partners have met multiple criteria, including:

Demonstrated core Kubernetes functionality including dynamic provisioning of volumes via open and portable Kubernetes-native storage APIs.
A proven ability to automatically manage storage across cluster scale-up and scale-down scenarios.
A simplified deployment experience following Kubernetes practices.

“Speed is the new scale in the world upset by digital transformation, the complex reality is that data and resources live anywhere and everywhere.” said Anthony Lye, senior vice president and general manager, Cloud Data Services at NetApp. “We’re excited to expand our support for customers on Anthos in the hybrid multicloud as a part of the Anthos Ready Storage initiative. Together, Google Cloud’s Anthos and NetApp Trident and Kubernetes-ready storage offer a proven solution that helps customers manage their data on public cloud, on premises and hybrid cloud environments.”

“Speed to market is a key differentiator as companies develop next generation, cloud-native applications. The emergence of Kubernetes is driven by that need for agility,” said Jay Snyder, SVP Global Alliances, Dell Technologies. “We’re pleased to participate in this program, as Dell EMC PowerMax and VxFlex are ideal infrastructure options when paired with Google Cloud Anthos to deploy Kubernetes in multi-cloud environments.”

“Businesses are moving rapidly to modernize their applications using container based architectures,” said Omer Asad, VP and GM Primary Storage & Data Services at HP Enterprise. “We’re excited to expand our work with Google Cloud to qualify our fully-managed, container-based storage solutions such as HPE Nimble Storage for the Anthos platform.”

We’re committed to meeting customers where they are, and providing them with the ability to run key workloads and applications in the environment best suited for their business.

To learn more about the Anthos Ready Storage program, please visit here. To get started with Anthos, contact us.

New AMD EPYC-based Compute Engine family, now in beta

At Google Cloud, we want you to be able to choose the best VMs for your workloads. Today, we’re excited to announce a new addition to our general purpose VMs: the N2D family, built atop 2nd Gen AMD EPYC™ Processors.

N2D VMs are a great option for both general-purpose workloads and workloads that require high memory bandwidth.

General-purpose workloads that require a balance of compute and memory, like web applications and databases, can benefit from N2D’s performance, price, and features. N2D VMs are designed to provide you with the same features as N2 VMs including local SSD, custom machine types, and transparent maintenance through live migration, while features like large machine types with up to an industry-leading 224 vCPUs, the largest general purpose VM on Compute Engine. At the same time, N2D instances provide savings of up to 13% over comparable N-series instances, and up to a 39% performance improvement on the Coremark benchmark compared to comparable N1 instances¹.
HPC workloads such as crash analysis, financial modeling, rendering and reservoir analysis, will benefit from the N2D machine types configured with 128 and 224 vCPUs, which offer up to 70% higher platform memory bandwidth than comparable N1 instances. This, combined with higher core counts, provides over a 100% performance improvement on a variety of representative benchmarks, including Gromacs and NAMD, compared to n1-standard-96 vCPUs.

N2D machine type details

N2D VMs are now available in beta from us-central1, asia-southeast1, and europe-west4, with more regions on the way! You can launch them on-demand or as preemptible VMs.When you sign up for committed use discounts, you can save up to 55% for three-year commitments versus on-demand pricing. Long-running N2D VMs can take advantage of sustained use discounts, and automatically save up to 20%. You can also configure N2D VMs as predefined machine types with vCPU to memory ratios of 1:1, 1:4, and 1:8, up to 224 vCPUs. You can also create custom machine types with N2Ds, helping you meet the needs of diverse workloads.

Get started

It’s easy to get started with N2D VMs—simply visit the Google Cloud Console and launch one! To learn more about N2D VMs or other Compute Engine VM options, check out our machine types and our pricing pages.

_{1. N2D-standard-32 performed 39% better than N1-standard-32 when evaluated using Coremark.}