General tips for using Compute Engine

This page describes tips that you might find helpful if you run into problems using Compute Engine.

For help troubleshooting specific issues, see one of the following sections:

Viewing different response formats

The gcloud command-line tool performs most of its actions by making REST API calls. The pretty-printed results show only the most important information returned by any specific command. To see the different response formats, use the --format flag which displays the response in different output formats, including json, yaml, and text. For example, to see a list of instances in JSON, use --format json:

gcloud compute instances list --format json

Viewing gcloud compute logs

The gcloud tool creates and stores logs in a log file that you can query, located at $HOME/.config/gcloud/logs. To see the latest log file on a Linux-based operating system, run:

$ less $(find ~/.config/gcloud/logs | sort | tail -n 1)

The log file includes information about all requests and responses made using the gcloud compute tool.

Selecting resource names

When selecting names for your resources, keep in mind that these friendly-names may be visible on support and operational dashboards within Compute Engine. For this reason, it is recommended that resource names that do not expose any sensitive information.

Communicating between your instances and the internet

An instance has direct internet access only if it has an external IP address. An instance with an external IP can always initiate connections to the internet. It can also receive connections, provided that a firewall rule is configured to allow access. You can add a custom firewall rule to the default VPC network, or add a new network with custom firewalls. In addition, you can set up a network proxy within the VPC network environment to provide proxied access from an instance without an external IP address.

Note that idle connections are tracked for a maximum of 10 minutes, after which their traffic is subject to firewall rules, including the implied deny ingress rule. If your instance initiates or accepts long-lived connections with an external host, you should adjust TCP keep-alive settings on your Compute Engine instances to less than 600 seconds to ensure that connections are refreshed before the timeout occurs. The following examples set the keep-alives to one minute (60 seconds). Note that applications running on Linux systems need to explicitly set the SO_KEEPALIVE socket option on TCP connections to enable TCP keep-alive (see also Linux TCP Keepalive HOWTO).

Compute Engine instance or Linux client


Run the following command: 

$ sudo /sbin/sysctl -w net.ipv4.tcp_keepalive_time=60 net.ipv4.tcp_keepalive_intvl=60 net.ipv4.tcp_keepalive_probes=5
To ensure that the settings survive a reboot, add the settings to your /etc/sysctl.conf file.

Mac OSX client


Run the following command: 

$ sudo sysctl -w net.inet.tcp.always_keepalive=1 net.inet.tcp.keepidle=60000 net.inet.tcp.keepinit=60000 net.inet.tcp.keepintvl=60000

Windows client


Under the registry path HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters\, add the following settings, using the DWORD data type, or edit the values if the settings already exist: 

KeepAliveInterval: 1000
KeepAliveTime: 60000
TcpMaxDataRetransmissions: 10

Accessing Compute Engine as a different SSH user

By default, the gcloud compute command-line tool uses the $USER variable to add users to the /etc/passwd file for connecting to virtual machine instances using SSH. You can specify a different user using the --ssh-key-file PRIVATE_KEY_FILE flag when running the gcloud compute ssh command. For example:

gcloud compute ssh example-instance --ssh-key-file my-private-key-file

See the gcloud reference documentation for more information.

Interacting with the serial console

You can enable interactive access to an instance's serial console so you can connect and troubleshoot instances through the serial console.

To learn more, read Interacting with the Serial Console.

Avoiding packet fragmentation to instances built from custom images

The VPC network has a default maximum transmission unit (MTU) of 1460 bytes for Linux images and Windows Server images. However, the network MTU can be changed. For details, see Maximum transmission unit (MTU) in the VPC documentation.

When creating client applications that communicate with Compute Engine instances over UDP sockets, you can avoid fragmentation if you set the maximum size of the UDP datagram's data to 28 bytes less than the network MTU. For example, if the network's MTU is 1460 bytes, you can send up to 1432 bytes of UDP data per packet without fragmentation. If the network's MTU is 1500 bytes, you can send up to 1472 bytes of UDP data without fragmentation. The 28 bytes are used for an IPv4 packet header (20 bytes) and a UDP datagram header (8 bytes).