Stackdriver provides powerful monitoring, logging, and diagnostics. Dataflow integration with Stackdriver Monitoring lets you access Dataflow job metrics such as Job Status, Element Counts, System Lag (for streaming jobs), and User Counters from the Stackdriver dashboards. You can also employ Stackdriver alerting capabilities to notify you of various conditions, such as long streaming system lag or failed jobs.
Before you begin
Follow one of the quickstarts to get your Dataflow project set up and construct and run your pipeline.
Custom metrics
Any metric you define in your Apache Beam pipeline is reported by
Dataflow to Stackdriver as a custom metric. There
are three types of
Apache Beam pipeline metrics:
Counter
, Distribution
, and Gauge
. Dataflow currently only
reports Counter
and Distribution
to
Stackdriver. Distribution
is reported as four
sub-metrics suffixed with \_MAX
, \_MIN
,
\_MEAN
, and \_COUNT
. Dataflow does not support creating a
histogram from Distribution
sub-metrics.
Dataflow reports incremental updates to Stackdriver
approximately every 30 seconds. All user metrics are exported as a double
data type to avoid conflicts. Custom metrics in Dataflow
appear in Stackdriver
as custom.googleapis.com/dataflow/metric-name
and are
limited to 500 metrics per project.
Custom metrics reported to Stackdriver incurs charges based on the Stackdriver Monitoring pricing.
Explore metrics
You can explore Dataflow metrics using Stackdriver. Follow the steps in this section to observe the several standard metrics provided for each of your Apache Beam pipelines.
In the Google Cloud Console, select Stackdriver Monitoring:
If the Add your project to a Workspace dialog is displayed, create a new Workspace by selecting your Google Cloud project under New Workspace and then clicking Add. In the following image, the Google Cloud project name is
Quickstart
:The Add your project to a Workspace dialog is displayed only when you have at least one existing Workspace available to you. The Workspaces listed under Existing Workspace are Workspaces you've created or Workspaces for Google Cloud projects where you have editorial permission. You can choose between creating a new Workspace and adding your project to an existing Workspace by using this dialog.
In the Resource menu, select Metrics Explorer.
In the Find a resource type and/or a metric pane, select the
dataflow_job
resource type.From the list that appears, select a metric you'd like to observe for one of your jobs.
For example: This example shows a streaming pipeline that reads from a Cloud Pub/Sub topic and writes to BigQuery. It has 5 steps, one of which isPubsubIO.Read
. The image below displays thedataflow/job/element_count
for thePubsubIO.Read
step of the pipeline.
Create alerts and dashboards
Stackdriver does not only provide you with access to Dataflow-related metrics, but also lets you to create alerts and dashboards so you can chart time series of metrics and choose to be notified when these metrics reach specified values.
Create groups of resources
You can create resource groups that include multiple Apache Beam pipelines so that you can easily set alerts and build dashboards.
In the Google Cloud Console, select Stackdriver Monitoring:
In the Groups menu, select Create Groups.
Add filter criteria that define the Dataflow resources included in the group. For example, one of your filter criteria can be the name prefix of your pipelines.
After the group is created, you can see the basic metrics related to resources in that group.
Create alerts for Cloud Dataflow metrics
Stackdriver gives you the ability to create alerts and be notified when a certain metric crosses a specified threshold. For example, when System Lag of a streaming pipeline increases above a predefined value.
In the Google Cloud Console, select Stackdriver Monitoring:
In the Alerting menu, select Policies Overview.
Click on Add Policy.
In the Create new alerting policy page, you can define the alerting conditions and the channels of communication for alerts.
For example, to set an alert on the System Lag for theWindowedWordCount
Apache Beam pipeline group, select 'Dataflow Job' in the Resource Type dropdown, 'Group' in the Applies To dropdown, and 'System Lag' in the If Metric dropdown.After you've created an alert, you can review the events related to Dataflow by navigating to Alerting > Events. Every time an alert is triggered by a Metric Threshold condition, an Incident and a corresponding Event are created in Stackdriver. If you specified a notification mechanism in the alert, such as email or SMS, you will also receive a notification.
Build your own custom monitoring dashboard
You can build Stackdriver monitoring dashboards with the most relevant Dataflow-related charts.
Go to the Google Cloud Console, and select Stackdriver Monitoring:
Select Dashboards > Create Dashboard.
Click on Add Chart.
In the Add Chart window, select "Dataflow Job" as the Resource Type, select a metric you want to chart in the Metric Type field, and select a group that contains Apache Beam pipelines in the Filter panel.
You can add as many charts to the dashboard as you like.
Receive worker VM metrics from Stackdriver Monitoring agent
If you would like to monitor persistent disk, CPU, network, and process metrics from your Dataflow worker VM instances, you can enable the Stackdriver Monitoring Agent when you run your pipeline. See the list of available Monitoring agent metrics.
To enable the Monitoring agent, use the --experiments=enable_stackdriver_agent_metrics
option when running your pipeline.
To disable the Monitoring agent without stopping your pipeline, update your pipeline by
launching a replacement job
and without specifying the --experiments=enable_stackdriver_agent_metrics
parameter.
What's next
To learn more, consider exploring these other resources: