Verify GKE Service Availability with new dedicated uptime checks

Keeping the experience of your end user in mind is important when developing applications. Observability tools help your team measure important performance indicators that are important to your users, like uptime. It’s generally a good practice to measure your service internally via metrics and logs which can give you indications of uptime, but an external signal is very useful as well, wherever feasible. 

One of the easiest ways to measure your services externally is to use an established and trusted technology, an uptime check. Uptime checks closely monitor the availability of your service and can serve as a leading indicator of a problem. This can hopefully help you reduce or eliminate the time an issue affects your users. 

Uptime checks for GKE services 

With the proliferation of the microservices architecture, more services means more endpoints to measure. Trying to track, isolate, and resolve issues can be increasingly complex. That’s why we’re excited to introduce the new uptime check for Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) LoadBalancer services. 

Google Cloud has offered uptime checks for different types of resources, but none of these provided a direct association with GKE. With our new integration, the GKE LoadBalancer uptime check directly associates a service load balancer with an uptime check, helping to ensure the uptime check is managed dynamically. As the underlying network for a service changes the uptime check changes with it, allowing you to quickly correlate a service with an uptime failure. 

You can also set up an alert policy based on your uptime check, allowing your SRE or Ops team to be notified of a meaningful issue that’s impacting your service.Once notified, you can jump straight into the associated GKE Dashboard to better isolate the root cause. 

Creating a new uptime check

To get started, you can head to Monitoring > Uptime and select “+ Create Uptime Check” and then select the new Kubernetes Loadbalancer Service option.

More information

Visit our documentation for Managing uptime checks, where you can get additional information and step by step instructions for creating your first uptime check.

Lastly, if you have questions or feedback about this new feature, head to the Cloud Operations Community page and let us know!