Regionalization and location settings

When you create an agent, you must specify a region as the agent's location. Requests sent to your agent are handled by Google services in this region and Conversational Agents (Dialogflow CX) keeps data-at-rest physically within the geographical region or location. For the best performance, you should choose a region that is near your services and end-users.

Once an agent is created, its location cannot change. In order to change an agent's location, you must export and restore to a new agent with a different location.

Each location has associated settings that apply across your project. In most cases, you do not need to edit these location settings, and the default settings will work well. If your system requires customer-managed encryption keys (often required by government entities or regulated industries), read more about location settings.

Limitations

The following limitations apply:

• Region support for different telephony integrations may vary. Check documentation for each integration.

• System entity support differs for each language. See the system entity limitations for details.

• The APIs Explorer, found on many REST reference documents, only supports the global region for API calls.

Available regions

Important: Machine learning (ML) processing for generative models occurs within the US when requests are made to regionally-available APIs in the US, or within the EU when requests are made to regionally-available APIs in Europe. For more details about supported regions, see the Vertex AI documentation.

Conversational Agents (Dialogflow CX) supports the following regions for agent location. Data store agents support a subset of these regions and the region IDs used by data stores differ slightly from the agent regions. All regions with a value for the Data store region ID column are supported by data store agents in Vertex AI Conversation.

Country grouping	Geographical location	Agent region ID	Data store region ID
Americas	Iowa	us-central1	us (multi-region)
Americas	Montréal	northamerica-northeast1
Americas	South Carolina	us-east1
Americas	Oregon	us-west1
Americas	United States multi-region	us *	us (multi-region) *
Europe	Belgium	europe-west1	eu (multi-region)
Europe	London	europe-west2
Europe	Frankfurt	europe-west3
Asia Pacific	Sydney	australia-southeast1
Asia Pacific	Tokyo	asia-northeast1
Asia Pacific	Mumbai	asia-south1
Asia Pacific	Singapore	asia-southeast1
Global	Global multi-region (global serving, data-at-rest in United States)	global (preferred) or no region (default) ¶	global (multi-region) ¶

Symbol	Description
*	Vertex AI does not support the 'us' multi-region location. As a result, using Conversational Agents (Dialogflow CX)'s Generative AI features in 'us' multi-region will rely on the respective existing U.S. single region endpoints.
¶	Calls to the global region may have higher latency when called from outside of the US. Prefer a more specific region that is closer to your services and end-users, if possible.

You can read more about regions used by Google Cloud at Google Cloud regions and Google Cloud geography and regions.

Location settings

If your system requires customer-managed encryption keys (often required by government entities or regulated industries), you can use location settings to configure this feature.

Location settings are shared across the project, and each unique location has its own location settings. Once settings for a specific location are configured for a project, the settings cannot change for that location. If you need to change these settings, you must create a new project.

If you create an agent without editing the location settings, the default settings will be configured for that location, and they cannot be changed for the project. In addition, once an agent is created, its location cannot change. In order to change an agent's location, you must export and restore to a new agent with a different location.

The following location settings are available:

• Encryption: This setting controls whether Google-managed or customer-managed encryption keys are used to protect data. The default is Google-managed. You must request access (by contacting your Google representative) to the customer-managed encryption keys feature to change this setting.

You can configure location settings in two ways:

• Click Location settings from the agent selector interface.
• Click the Edit button next to the Location drop down when creating an agent.

Note: Currently, you cannot update location settings with the API.

Specify a region with the API

You must specify a region for all API requests.

For REST calls, you must do both of the following:

• Provide the region ID for the location URL path parameter.

• For the global region, use dialogflow.googleapis.com for the hostname. For all other regions, use [region-id]-dialogflow.googleapis.com for the hostname.

For example:

• dialogflow.googleapis.com/projects/{PROJECT_ID}/locations/global/agents/{AGENT_ID}

• us-central1-dialogflow.googleapis.com/projects/{PROJECT_ID}/locations/us-central1/agents/{AGENT_ID}

For client libraries, see the client library documentation for a region configuration option.

You can find examples in the API quickstart.

Caution: As described in the setup documentation, you should use the GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS environment variable to provide your client libraries with credentials. However, if you need to manually provide a credentials file in your code, you need to take one additional step when calling a regionalized endpoint. Set the scope to https://www.googleapis.com/auth/cloud-platform when generating your authentication credentials. For example, this is accomplished in Java when creating a GoogleCredentials object:

GoogleCredentials.fromStream(new FileInputStream("credential_file"))
  .createScoped("https://www.googleapis.com/auth/cloud-platform")
  

Cloud logging

See the Cloud logging guide to control the region in which logs are stored.