Installable dashboards

Cloud Monitoring provides a set of dashboard definitions available on GitHub in the monitoring-dashboard-samples repository as JSON files.

These JSON files provide dashboards with charts specific to a variety of Google Cloud services, for example Compute Engine, Cloud Storage, BigQuery, and others. The charts present a selection of metrics relevant to a specific service.

You can modify these custom dashboards to suit your needs.

You can install these dashboards by using the gcloud monitoring dashboards create command or the dashboards.create method in the Cloud Monitoring API.

This page provides information on installing and viewing these dashboards.

Installing a dashboard

To install dashboards from the GitHub repository, do the following:

  1. Clone or download the repository:

    git clone https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/monitoring-dashboard-samples.git

  2. Identify the dashboards you want to install. For example, the directory monitoring-dashboard-samples/dashboards/compute contains a file named gce-vm-instance-monitoring.json.

  3. Install the desired dashboards. For example:

    gcloud monitoring dashboards create --config-from-file=gce-vm-instance-monitoring.json

For more information about installing dashboards, see Using the API.

Viewing the installed dashboard

Each file in the repository creates a new custom dashboard. For example, the file gce-vm-instance-monitoring.json creates a dashboard with the title "GCE VM Instance Monitoring".

  1. In the Cloud Console, select Monitoring or click the following button:

    Go to Monitoring

  2. In the Monitoring navigation panel, click Dashboards.

  3. Click on "GCE VM Instance Monitoring" in the list. If you have a lot of dashboards, you might want to filter for custom dashboards or for the name of the new dashboard. For information on filtering this list, see Viewing custom dashboards.

The following screenshot shows the part of the installed dashboard:

Example of the GCE VM Instance Monitoring dashboard.

Tutorial: versioning your dashboards

If you are interested learning how to to version-control your Cloud Monitoring dashboards by using the Cloud Monitoring API, then see the tutorial Managing Cloud Monitoring dashboards automatically using the Cloud Monitoring API.