View and customize 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 and, in some cases, copy the dashboards that Monitoring creates for your Google Cloud services. You can't delete or modify the automatically-created dashboards; however, when support for copying the dashboard exists, you can modify the copy. In general, you can also copy charts on a predefined dashboard to a dashboard 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 to projects, folders, and organizations.

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, go to the  Dashboards page:

    Go to Dashboards

    If you use the search bar to find this page, then select the result whose subheading is Monitoring.

  2. In the Categories pane, select G​C​P.
  3. 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.

  4. To view the dashboard for a specific service, select that service in the list of dashboards.

    • To view Google Kubernetes Engine performance data, examine the dashboards whose names begin with GKE.

      For example, the GKE dashboard reports data in a tabular format about your clusters, namespaces, nodes, workloads, and services. In contrast, the GKE Compute Resources dashboard displays charts that show information about memory and CPU utilization.

    • To view metrics and logs for an individual VM, click VM Instances, and then select the VM whose data you want to view.

      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.

    • To view the metrics for all of your VMs, click GCE VM Instance Monitoring.

Customize dashboards for Google Cloud services

You can't delete or modify the automatically-created dashboards; however, in some cases you can copy these dashboards. You can modify the content of the copy, and you can delete the copy. For example, you might add widgets that display log data and delete uninteresting charts.

To create a copy of a dashboard for a Google Cloud service, do the following:

  1. In the Google Cloud console, go to the  Dashboards page:

    Go to Dashboards

    If you use the search bar to find this page, then select the result whose subheading is Monitoring.

  2. In the Categories pane, select G​C​P.

  3. Locate the dashboard that you want to copy, and then click Copy dashboard.

    Not all dashboards for Google Cloud services can be copied. If the copy icon isn't displayed, then the dashboard can't be copied.

  4. In the copy dialog, enter the name for the dashboard, and then click Copy.

The new dashboard that you created is listed in the Custom category. You can add and remove widgets, reposition widgets, and resize widgets. You can also delete the dashboard. For more information about adding widgets, see the following pages:

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, go to the  Dashboards page:

    Go to Dashboards

    If you use the search bar to find this page, then select the result whose subheading is Monitoring.

  2. Select the Google Cloud dashboard and then identify the chart that you want to copy.
  3. In the chart toolbar, select More chart options.
  4. If Clone widget is a menu option, then select Clone widget, select the dashboard where the clone is to be saved, and then click Clone.
  5. Otherwise, select View in Metrics Explorer, select Save chart, select the dashboard where the chart is to be saved, and then click Save chart.

Configure data refresh

When you open a dashboard, it is configured with auto refresh disabled. The toolbar displays a toggle, , which indicates this state.

For your current session, to enable auto refresh, go to the toolbar and select Enable auto refresh.

To disable auto refresh after you've enabled it, go to the toolbar and select Disabled auto refresh.

What's next