Introducing Active Assist recommendations for service limits (quotas)

We are excited to introduce service limit (quota) recommender, a new feature from Active Assist that helps you track and act on quota limits. The recommender analyzes your quota utilization and provides you with actionable and automatic recommendations to review quotas that have high utilization and are likely to run out. This feature is available to all customers today. 

Quota management can be challenging for large organizations, presenting downtime risks

Google Cloud implements quota limits to provide highly available service to all customers and protect you from unforeseen spikes in usage/spend. Managing quotas and limits is a balancing act. On one hand, you don’t want to limit your organization’s healthy growth and operation. On the other hand, you want to ensure the right limits are in place to protect yourself from bad actors, runaway workloads, and unexpected spikes in costs. Finding the right balance requires monitoring and analyzing your quota utilization so that you have enough time to request limit increases, redistribute work, or shut down resources before the limit is reached and causes downtime to your workload.

A single cloud project might consume hundreds of different API rate and resource allocation quotas.  Consumption patterns can vary over time and may be driven by a combination of customer-owned cloud applications, each owned and managed by a different member of your organization.  This complexity can make it challenging to find quotas that need attention across your organization and to take action at the right time to avoid hitting a limit.  

Discovering and acting on quota recommendations

The service limit recommender analyzes usage of all rate and allocation quotas over the last 30 days. If at any point during those 30 days your utilization reaches 80% of your current limit, a recommendation will be generated.

Within the recommendation you can view the service and quota name, the peak usage in the past observation period, and the current quota maximum. From there you can consider the following options to resolve the recommendation:

• Decrease or monitor your quota usage. You may want to reduce API calls, shut down resources, reschedule work, or redistribute work to a different region. Active Assist also provides a variety of unattended/idle recommendations that can help you find sources of unnecessary resource consumption. Recommendations will persist until we have detected the threshold was reached in the last 30 days. You can continue to monitor the recommendation, or set up real time alerts through Alerting Policies in Cloud Monitoring. 

• If there’s a quota override in effect, remove it or increase the limit. If you don’t have permission to remove an override you’ll need to contact an administrator in your organization.

• Request a quota increase. Quota increases aren’t guaranteed and depend on criteria like the availability of resources and how long you’ve used Google Cloud, among others. 

• Dismiss the recommendation. In cases where high quota utilization is not a concern, you can choose to dismiss the recommendation to better focus on the limits you care about.

Google Cloud Solutions Engineering also previously announced a Quota Monitoring Solution, an open-source solution that customers can deploy on Google Cloud to centrally monitor and track quota usage across multiple projects, folders, and organizations. The new service limit recommender complements this solution with a layer of intelligence and proactive GCP-managed recommendations, prompting you to review and take action on quotas that are approaching their limits. You can also always view your current quota information on the Quotas page using the Google Cloud Console or by using the gcloud command-line tool. 

Getting started with recommendations

Service limits insights and recommendations can be accessed through gcloud, the Recommender API, or the Recommendation Hub in the Google Cloud Console to view all recommendations available to you in your project. To view the recommendations, you need the appropriate IAM permissions. 

You can also automatically export the recommendations to BigQuery and then investigate your recommendations with DataStudio or Looker. This makes it easier for you to get the organization-level view of potential quota bottlenecks and integrate with your company’s existing monitoring solutions and workflows. 

We hope you use our Service Limit Recommender to help you manage your quotas, and we look forward to continuing to improve your experience. Please feel free to reach us at active-assist-feedback@google.com. We also invite you to sign up for our Active Assist Trusted Tester Group if you would like to get early access to new features as they are developed.