Monitor your usage of Sensitive Data Protection

This page describes how to use Cloud Monitoring to view and graph metrics data about your Sensitive Data Protection usage.

Sensitive Data Protection sends detailed telemetry about your Sensitive Data Protection usage to Monitoring. This can be useful to monitor for unexpected findings, amount of data scanned or transformed, errors in job triggers or jobs, and expenses.

View Sensitive Data Protection metrics in Monitoring

Using Metrics Explorer in Cloud Monitoring, you can dig into available metrics data to give you insight into your Sensitive Data Protection usage. Monitoring supports a wide variety of metrics, which you can combine with filters and aggregations for new and insightful views.

To view the metrics for a monitored resource by using the Preview interface for Metrics Explorer, do the following:

  1. In the navigation panel of the Google Cloud console, select Monitoring, and then select  Metrics explorer:

    Go to Metrics explorer

  2. In the Metric element, expand the Select a metric menu, and then select a resource type and metric type. For example, to chart the CPU utilization of a virtual machine, do the following:
    1. (Optional) To reduce the menu's options, enter part of the metric name in the Filter bar. For this example, enter utilization.
    2. In the Active resources menu, select VM instance.
    3. In the Active metric categories menu, select Instance.
    4. In the Active metrics menu, select CPU utilization and then click Apply.

  3. To filter which time series are displayed, use the Filter element.

  4. To combine time series, use the menus on the Aggregation element. For example, to display the CPU utilization for your VMs, based on their zone, set the first menu to Mean and the second menu to zone.

    All time series are displayed when the first menu of the Aggregation element is set to Unaggregated. The default settings for the Aggregation element are determined by the metric type you selected.

To see Sensitive Data Protection-specific metrics in Metrics Explorer, search with dlp.googleapis.com to refine your search results.

To see API metrics in Metrics Explorer, select Consumed API as the resource type, and then use the filter and aggregation options to refine your data.

After you've found the metrics you want, you can use Monitoring to create custom dashboards and alerts that will help you continue to monitor and maintain a robust application.

Graph the metrics

You can graph metrics by aggregating them using Advanced Aggregation. Use the following settings:

  • Aligner: SUM
  • Alignment Period: 1440
Cloud Monitoring metric configuration.
Cloud Monitoring metric configuration (click to enlarge).

You get a chart showing the results per day.

Cloud Monitoring metric configuration.
Cloud Monitoring metric configuration (click to enlarge).

Cloud Monitoring supports alerting on all metrics. Using the Sensitive Data Protection metrics, you can alert on use cases that include:

  • Monitor content_bytes_inspected_count or content_bytes_transformed_count to alert when spend has exceeded budget for a day.
  • Alert when the number of total findings or findings for a specific infoType exceed a threshold. For example, you can build an alert if CREDIT_CARD_NUMBER findings exceed 0 in a given project where no PII should exist.

Available metrics

The following metric type names must be prefixed with dlp.googleapis.com/. That prefix has been omitted from the entries in the table.

Metric type
Display name
Kind, Type, Unit
Launch stage		 Description
Labels
finding_count
Number of findings
DELTA, INT64, By Number of findings per second. Only populated for jobs where the action PublishToStackdriver is included.
content_bytes_inspected_count
Content bytes inspected
DELTA, INT64, By Number of bytes inspected in content methods per second.
content_bytes_transformed_count
Content bytes transformed
DELTA, INT64, By Number of bytes transformed in content methods per second.
storage_bytes_inspected_count
Storage bytes inspected
DELTA, INT64, By Number of bytes inspected in Sensitive Data Protection jobs.
storage_bytes_transformed_count
Storage bytes transformed
DELTA, INT64, By Number of bytes transformed in Sensitive Data Protection jobs.
job_result_count
Job results
DELTA, INT64, 1 Results of Sensitive Data Protection jobs. True if the job was success and false otherwise.
job_trigger_run_count
Job trigger runs
DELTA, INT64, 1 Results of job trigger runs.