View Google Cloud dashboards

Google Cloud services such as Compute Engine, provide dashboards that display information, including metrics, about those services. Cloud Monitoring also deploys service-specific dashboards as you add resources to your Google Cloud project. For example, when you install a Compute Engine virtual machine (VM) instance in your Google Cloud project, Monitoring installs dashboards for the instance and the disks.

This document describes how to view the dashboards Monitoring creates for your Google Cloud services. You can't delete or copy these dashboards, and you can't add or remove charts to these dashboards. However, you can use the dashboard toolbar to modify the display, and you can copy charts from these dashboards to dashboards that you create.

Dashboards that you create are custom dashboards. Custom dashboards let you display information that is of interest to you, organized in a way that's useful to you. For more information, see Create and manage custom dashboards.

By default, dashboards automatically refresh their display when new data is available. For information about how to change this setting, see Disable data refresh.

Before you begin

To get the permissions that you need to view dashboards by using the Google Cloud console, ask your administrator to grant you the Monitoring Viewer (roles/monitoring.viewer) IAM role on your project. For more information about granting roles, see Manage access.

You might also be able to get the required permissions through custom roles or other predefined roles.

For more information about roles, see Control access with Identity and Access Management.

View dashboards for Google Cloud services

  1. In the Google Cloud console, select Monitoring or click the following button:
    Go to Monitoring
  2. In the navigation pane, select Dashboards.
  3. In the Categories pane, select G​C​P.
  4. Optional: Add filters to the filter bar. When you add multiple filters and don't include the OR operator between two filters, a logical-AND joins the filters.
  5. To view the dashboard for a specific service, select that service in the list of dashboards.

View a Compute Engine instance dashboard

  1. In the Google Cloud console, select Monitoring or click the following button:
    Go to Monitoring
  2. In the navigation pane, select Dashboards.
  3. In the Categories pane, select G​C​P.

  4. In the resulting list, click VM Instances.

    The VM Instances page lists your VM instances. From this list, you can view details about each instance, such as the instance name, and access a detailed dashboard for an instance.

    Compute Engine also provides a dashboard for each VM instance, and the Observability tab of that dashboard displays the same metrics and logs that you can view from the dashboard provided by Cloud Monitoring. For more information about the Compute Engine dashboard, see Observe and monitor VMs.

  5. Select the instance name from the list of instances.

View a Google Kubernetes Engine dashboard

  1. In the Google Cloud console, select Monitoring or click the following button:
    Go to Monitoring
  2. In the navigation pane, select Dashboards.
  3. In the Categories pane, select G​C​P.
  4. Select GKE from the list of dashboards.

Copy a chart to a custom dashboard

A Google Cloud dashboard might only display some metric data that you want to view. While you can't add widgets to a Google Cloud dashboard, you can copy some widgets from these dashboards to custom dashboards. Not all widgets support the copy operation.

To copy a widget on a Google Cloud dashboard to a custom dashboard, do the following:

  1. In the Google Cloud console, select Monitoring or click the following button:
    Go to Monitoring
  2. In the navigation pane, select Dashboards.
  3. Select the Google Cloud dashboard and then identify the chart that you want to copy.
  4. In the chart toolbar, select More and then select Add to custom dashboard.
  5. Complete the dialog and then click Copy.

Configure data refresh

The dashboard toolbar displays a button that indicates whether auto refresh is enabled, , or disabled, . To change the state, click the button.

What's next