View VM operations

When you make an update to a VM that mutates (alters) data, or when a host event occurs that changes the state of a VM, Compute Engine adds an entry to the list of operations. This page describes how you can view a list of completed Compute Engine operations by using the Google Cloud console, the Google Cloud CLI, or the Compute Engine API.

Before you begin

Viewing operations

To view a list of operations for your project, perform the following steps:

Console

  1. In the Google Cloud console, go to the Operations page.

    Go to Operations

  2. For more details on an operation, click the operation summary. For example, to view the migration details for the my-instance VM, click the Automatically migrate an instance operation.

The operations page showing a live migration. Live migration details.

gcloud

To view a list of operations for your project using gcloud compute, use the operations list sub-command.

To view the list of operations in a specified zone, add the --filter flag.

gcloud compute operations list --filter="zone:(ZONE)"

Replace ZONE with the zone where you want to view a list of operations. For example, to view the list of operations in us-cental1-c, run the following command:

gcloud compute operations list --filter="zone:(us-central1-c)"

The output is similar to the following: 

NAME                            TYPE                                        TARGET                                HTTP_STATUS  STATUS  TIMESTAMP
systemevent-1543845145000...    compute.instances.migrateOnHostMaintenance  us-central1-c/instances/my-instance   200          DONE    2018-12-03T05:52:25.000-08:00

API

API requests for operations must be specified at either the global, region, or zone level. Live migration, VM stopping, and automatic restarts are all zone-level operations.

For zone operations, make a GET request to the zoneOperations.list method.

GET https://compute.googleapis.com/compute/v1/projects/PROJECT_ID/zones/ZONE/operations

Replace the following:

  • PROJECT_ID: the project ID for this request
  • ZONE: the zone for this request

Leave the request body empty.

The following is a sample output for a zone operation request. In this output, details for a host migration displays.

{
 "kind": "compute#operation",
 "id": "3216798767364213712",
 "name": "systemevent-1543845145000-57c1e7574b840-a195b637-5ff74d9b",
 "zone": "https://www.googleapis.com/compute/v1/projects/my-project/zones/us-central1-c",
 "operationType": "compute.instances.migrateOnHostMaintenance",
 "targetLink": "https://www.googleapis.com/compute/v1/projects/my-project/zones/us-central1-c/instances/my-instance",
 "targetId": "3070988523247098025",
 "status": "DONE",
 "statusMessage": "Instance migrated during Compute Engine maintenance.",
 "user": "system",
 "progress": 100,
 "insertTime": "2018-12-03T05:52:25.000-08:00",
 "startTime": "2018-12-03T05:52:25.000-08:00",
 "endTime": "2018-12-03T05:52:25.000-08:00",
 "selfLink": "https://www.googleapis.com/compute/v1/projects/my-project/zones/us-central1-c/operations/systemevent-1543845145000-57c1e7574b840-a195b637-5ff74d9b"
}