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:

1. On each VM or on the entire project, enable guest attributes and the OS Inventory metadata keys.
2. On each VM, install the OS Config agent.
3. (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:

• On your Google Cloud project, enable the OS Config API.
• On your VM or project, enable the OS Config agent metadata keys.
• On each VM, install the OS Config agent.
• On your Google Cloud project, enable the Cloud Asset Inventory API, the Cloud SDK, and assign permissions.

Enable guest attributes and OS inventory management

To enable guest attributes and OS inventory management you need to set some specific metadata keys.

To set custom metadata for an instance or project, you can use the Google Cloud Console, the gcloud command-line tool, or the Compute Engine API. You can set these attributes at the instance or project level.

Note: If you want to use the Cloud Asset Inventory integration, you only need to set the enable-os-inventory metadata key.

Console

You can apply the metadata values on your projects or instances using one of the following options:

Set enable-guest-attributes and enable-os-inventory in instance metadata when you create an instance:

1. In the Google Cloud Console, go to the VM Instances page.

   Go to the VM instances page

2. Click Create instance.
3. On the Create a new instance page, fill in the desired properties for your instance.

4. In the Metadata section, add the following metadata entries:

   • enable-guest-attributes and the value is TRUE.
   • enable-os-inventory and the value is TRUE.

5. Click Create to create the instance.

Set enable-guest-attributes and enable-os-inventory in project-wide metadata so that it applies to all of the instances in your project:

1. Go to the Metadata page.

   Go to the Metadata page

2. Click Edit.

3. Add the following metadata entries:

   • enable-guest-attributes and the value is TRUE.
   • enable-os-inventory and the value is TRUE.

4. Click Save to apply the changes.

Set enable-guest-attributes and enable-os-inventory in metadata of an existing instance:

1. Go to the VM instances page.

   Go to the VM instances page

2. Click the name of the instance on which you want to set the metadata value.
3. At the top of the instance details page, click Edit to edit the instance settings.

4. Under Custom metadata, add the following metadata entries:

   • enable-guest-attributes and the value is TRUE.
   • enable-os-inventory and the value is TRUE.

5. At the bottom of the instance details page, click Save to apply your changes to the instance.

gcloud

Use the project-info add-metadata gcloud command to enable guest attributes and OS Inventory metadata keys.

You can apply the enable-guest-attributes and enable-os-inventory metadata values on your projects or instances using one of the following options:

Set enable-guest-attributes and enable-os-inventory in project-wide metadata so that it applies to all of the instances in your project. Replace project-id with your project ID.

gcloud compute project-info add-metadata \
    --project project-id \
    --metadata=enable-guest-attributes=true,enable-os-inventory=true

Set enable-guest-attributes and enable-os-inventory in metadata of an existing instance. Replace VM-NAME with the name of your instance.

gcloud compute instances add-metadata VM-NAME \
    --metadata=enable-guest-attributes=true,enable-os-inventory=true

Set enable-guest-attributes and enable-os-inventory in instance metadata when you create an instance. Replace VM-NAME with the name of your instance.

gcloud compute instances create VM-NAME \
    --metadata=enable-guest-attributes=true,enable-os-inventory=true

API

• For instructions on setting project-wide metadata, follow the API instructions for Setting project-wide custom metadata.
• For instructions on setting instance metadata, follow the API instructions for Setting instance metadata.

The following key-value pairs are required as your metadata values:

• Guest attributes:
  • Key: enable-guest-attributes
  • Value: True
• OS inventory management:
  • Key: enable-os-inventory
  • Value: True

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.