Getting support

Google's primary support objective is to resolve production incidents as quickly as possible. We do this by understanding your configuration, analyzing logs and metrics, and collaborating with partners to solve incidents quickly.

Google Cloud offers a variety of support packages to accommodate your support needs. All Google Cloud Support packages include support for GKE Enterprise and Google Distributed Cloud. If you have an existing Google Cloud Support package, then you already have support for GKE Enterprise and Google Distributed Cloud.

For more information, see the Google Cloud Support documentation.

Requirements for Google Distributed Cloud Support

To effectively troubleshoot business-critical incidents, you must:

1. Check that the environment is current with the published end-of-support timeframes (see Version Support Policy below).
2. Enable Cloud Logging and Cloud Monitoring for system components (for more details, see the Support tools section).
3. When you open a support case, provide a configuration snapshot using the gkectl diagnose snapshot command.

Support tools

To troubleshoot a Google Distributed Cloud incident, Google Cloud Support relies on three pieces of information:

• Your environment's configuration
• Logs from your admin and user clusters
• Metrics from your admin and user clusters

Configuration

When you open a support case, you are asked to run the gkectl diagnose snapshot --seed-config command and attach the resulting tarball to the support case. gkectl diagnose snapshot --seed-config captures information about Kubernetes and your nodes.

The tool is highly configurable and includes several predefined scenarios. You can also pass a YAML file with a customized set of information to gather. To learn more, refer to Diagnosing Clusters.

You can add an excludeWords field to your configuration file to omit sensitive or confidential information. Be sure to carefully review the information captured by the tool. Highly confidential or sensitive information should not be attached to your support case.

Logs

When you create a new Google Distributed Cloud cluster, Cloud Logging agents are enabled by default and scoped only to system-level components. This replicates system-level logs into the Google Cloud project associated with the cluster. System-level logs are from Kubernetes pods running in one of five namespaces:

• kube-system
• gke-system
• gke-connect
• istio-system
• config-management-system
• knative-serving

Logs can be queried from the Cloud Logging console.

Note: If Cloud Logging is disabled, support is offered on best-effort basis only and could require significant additional effort from your on-site engineering team.

For more details, see Logging and Monitoring.

Metrics

In addition to logs, metrics are also captured by the Cloud Monitoring agent. This replicates system-level metrics into the Google Cloud project associated with the cluster. System-level metrics are from Kubernetes pods running in the same namespaces listed in Logs.

Note: If Cloud Monitoring is disabled, support is offered on best-effort basis only and could require significant additional effort from your on-site engineering team.

For more details, see Logging and Monitoring.

How we troubleshoot your environment

Here is an example of a typical support incident:

1. Someone—for example, the cluster administrator—opens a support case via Google Cloud console or the Google Cloud Support Center, and selects Anthos and Google Distributed Cloud as Category and Component, respectively. They enter the information required and attach the output of gkectl diagnose snapshot to the case.
2. The support case is routed to a Technical Support Engineer specializing in Google Distributed Cloud.
3. The support engineer examines the contents of the snapshot to gain context of the environment.
4. The support engineer examines the logs and metrics in the Google Cloud project, entering the support case ID as the business justification, which is logged internally.
5. The support engineer responds to the case with an assessment and recommendation. The support engineer and the user continue troubleshooting until they come to a resolution.

Collaborative Support Partners

Google maintains collaborative support relationships with select partners to deliver a more seamless support experience for Google Distributed Cloud. With these relationships, Google is able to collaborate closely with that partner on behalf of our shared customers.

To benefit from Collaborative Support, you must maintain support agreements with both Google and the partner in question.

Google currently has a collaborative support relationship in place with the partners specified on the Collaborative Support Partners page.

Data about support issues may be shared with Collaborative Support Partners, as described in Google's Technical Support Services Guidelines.

What does Google support?

Generally, the Cloud Support team supports all software components shipped as part of Google Distributed Cloud. The table below details this further:

GCP Support	Collaborative Support	Not Supported
Kubernetes and the container runtime	VMware vSphere (vCenter Server and ESXi)	VMware products beyond vSphere
Canonical Ubuntu for guest/node OS	F5 BIG-IP load balancers	Customer code (see Developer Support below)
vCenter controller	Hardware and hyper-converged infrastructure solutions as listed in the Collaborative Support Partners page	Customer choice of host OS
F5 controller		Physical server, storage, and network
Calico and related network policies		External DNS, DHCP, and identity systems
Ingress controller		Calico Enterprise Edition
Prometheus and Grafana
Stackdriver Monitoring, Stackdriver Logging, and Stackdriver agents
Identity federation with OIDC compliant providers
Hub, Connect, and the Connect Agent
Knative serving / Knative
Bundled LoadBalancer (Seesaw)

Version Support Policy

Support for Google Distributed Cloud follows the Anthos Version Support Policy. Google supports the current version and the previous two (n-2) minor versions of Google Distributed Cloud.

The following table shows the supported and unsupported versions of this product.

Release version	Release date	End of life date^*
1.29 (latest)	April 29, 2024	April 29, 2025 or 1.32 release date
1.28	December 14, 2023	December 14, 2024 or 1.31 release date
1.16	August 23, 2023	August 23, 2024 or 1.30 release date
1.15 (unsupported)	May 2, 2023	May 2, 2024 or 1.29 release date

^*The EOL will be the later of these two dates.

Earlier versions

Unsupported Google Distributed Cloud versions

Release version	Release date	End of life date
1.14	December 21, 2022	December 21, 2023
1.13	September 29, 2022	August 17, 2023
1.12	July 7, 2022	March 29, 2023
1.11	April 27, 2022	December 21, 2022
1.10	December 22, 2021	September 22, 2022
1.9	September 29, 2021	June 29, 2022
1.8	June 28, 2021	March 28, 2022
1.7	March 25, 2021	December 25, 2021
1.6	December 10, 2020	September 10, 2021
1.5	September 24, 2020	June 24, 2021
1.4	June 25, 2020	March 25, 2021
1.3	March 23, 2020	December 23, 2020
1.2	December 20, 2019	September 20, 2020
1.1	September 26, 2019	June 26, 2020
1.0	July 25, 2019	April 25, 2020

Shared Responsibility Model

Running a business-critical production application on Google Distributed Cloud requires multiple parties to carry different responsibilities. These responsibilities are described at GKE Enterprise shared responsibility.

Developer Support

Google does not provide support for application workloads running on Google Distributed Cloud. However, we do provide best-effort developer support to ensure your developers can easily run applications on Google Distributed Cloud. We believe that engaging earlier during development can prevent critical incidents later in the deployment.

This Developer Support is available to customers with a paid support package and is treated at a priority level 3 for an issue blocking a launch, or at priority level 4 for general consultation. In this classification, priority level 0 is the highest priority.