Viewing operating system details

This page describes how to set up and use OS inventory management. For an overview of OS inventory management, see OS inventory management.

Use OS inventory management to collect and view operating system details for your VM instances (VMs). These operating system details include information such as hostname, operating system, and kernel version as well as installed packages, and available package updates for the operating system. For a list of common scenarios for using OS inventory management, review When to use OS inventory management.

Before you begin

If you want to use the command-line examples in this guide:
1. Install or update to the latest version of the gcloud command-line tool.
2. Set a default region and zone.
If you want to use the API examples in this guide, set up API access.

Supported operating systems

For the full list of operating systems and versions that support OS inventory management, see Operating system details. For the most up-to-date operating systems support, see Operating system details.

Overview

Before you can use OS inventory management, you need to configure your VMs to use the feature. To configure your VMs to use OS inventory management, you must complete the following procedures:

Set up VM Manager.
(Optional) If you want to integrate with Cloud Asset Inventory, see OS inventory and Cloud Asset Inventory integration

After setting up OS inventory management on your VMs, you can then view operating system details.

OS inventory and Cloud Asset Inventory integration

OS inventory management stores and forwards data to Cloud Asset Inventory. Cloud Asset Inventory is a metadata inventory service that allows you to view, monitor, and analyze assets across Google Cloud. From Cloud Asset Inventory, you can poll the information and view changes in the data.

To access OS inventory data from Cloud Asset Inventory, you need to complete the following setup:

Set up VM Manager.
On your Google Cloud project, enable the Cloud Asset Inventory API, the Cloud SDK, and assign permissions.

Viewing operating system details

Before you can view operating system details, make sure that you configure your VMs to use OS inventory management.

Viewing inventory data

To view the inventory data for your instance, use the instances os-inventory describe command. Replace VM-NAME with the name of your instance.

To view the inventory data collected for a VM, run the following command:

gcloud compute instances os-inventory describe VM-NAME

To view the types of output details that is returned, review Information provided by OS inventory management.

Listing VMs

To view the list of VMs that have OS inventory management set up, run the instances os-inventory list-instances command.

For example, to list all the VMs that have inventory data, run the following command:

gcloud compute instances os-inventory list-instances

Your output should resemble the following:

NAME                  ZONE        MACHINE_TYPE   PREEMPTIBLE  INTERNAL_IP  EXTERNAL_IP  STATUS
inventory-instance   us-east1-b    e2-standard-2               192.0.2.1                RUNNING
instance-inventory1  us-west1-b    e2-standard-2               192.0.2.2                RUNNING
instance-inventory2  asia-east2-b  e2-standard-2               192.0.2.3                RUNNING

You can also use filters to narrow down your results. For example, you can list all VMs that have OS inventory management set up and whose hostname matches the regex instance-* by running the following command:

gcloud compute instances os-inventory list-instances --inventory-filter="Hostname~instance-*"

Your output should resemble the following:

NAME                  ZONE        MACHINE_TYPE   PREEMPTIBLE  INTERNAL_IP  EXTERNAL_IP  STATUS
instance-inventory1  us-west1-b    e2-standard-2               192.0.2.2                RUNNING
instance-inventory2  asia-east2-b  e2-standard-2               192.0.2.3                RUNNING

What's next

Learn more about OS inventory management.