Quickstart for Datalab

This Quickstart shows you how to set up Datalab to use with your Cloud Monitoring projects. Datalab's dynamic notebooks let you perform ad hoc analyses and visualizations that go beyond the present features of Monitoring.

To preview the Monitoring tutorials in Datalab, see Monitoring tutorials. You cannot interact with the tutorials unless you are running Datalab.

Before you begin

  1. Sign in to your Google Account.

    If you don't already have one, sign up for a new account.

  2. In the Google Cloud Console, on the project selector page, select or create a Google Cloud project.

    Go to the project selector page

  3. Make sure that billing is enabled for your Cloud project. Learn how to confirm that billing is enabled for your project.

  4. Enable the Compute Engine and Cloud Source Repositories APIs.

    Enable the APIs

  5. Install and initialize the Cloud SDK.

Set up Datalab

Perform the following steps from a terminal window on your local machine:

  1. Get the latest gcloud command: 
    gcloud components update
  2. Install the gcloud datalab component: 
    gcloud components install datalab

  3. To configure gcloud to connect to your Google Cloud project ID, run the following command after replacing [PROJECT_ID] with your Google Cloud project ID: 

    gcloud config set project [PROJECT_ID]

    To verify the configuration, run the following command: 

    gcloud config get-value project

  4. To create a Datalab instance, run the following command after replacing [DATALAB-INSTANCE-NAME] with the name of your instance. Names must begin with a lowercase letter, be followed by no more than 62 lowercase letters, numbers, or hyphens, and must not end with a hyphen: 

    datalab create [DATALAB-INSTANCE-NAME]

    • If prompted, select a zone from the list.
    • If you are asked to set a SSH passphrase, enter a phrase. Be sure to save this passphrase.

    • After a few moments, a message similar to the one below is displayed.

      Created [https://www.googleapis.com/compute/v1/projects/[PROJECT_ID]/zones/[ZONE]/instances/[DATALAB-INSTANCE-NAME]].
Connecting to [DATALAB-INSTANCE-NAME].
This will create an SSH tunnel and may prompt you to create an rsa key pair. To manage these keys, see https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/adding-removing-ssh-keys
Waiting for Datalab to be reachable at http://localhost:8081/

      If prompted, enter your passphrase: 

      Enter passphrase for key '[...]/.ssh/google_compute_engine':

      After a few minutes, the create command completes successfully and a message similar to the one below is displayed: 

      The connection to Datalab is now open and will remain until this command is killed.
You can connect to Datalab at http://localhost:8081/

  5. The connection to your Datalab instance remains open while the datalab command is active. If the terminal command window is closed or interrupted, the connection is terminated. To re-establish the connection, run the following command: 

    datalab connect [DATALAB-INSTANCE-NAME]

The Datalab Interface

When you execute the datalab connect command, a browser window is opened with the URL set to http://127.0.0.1:8081/. This page displays the Datalab home page:

Datalab interface

In the Datalab docs/ folder there are several Datalab getting started notebooks you can explore, including notebooks for Cloud Monitoring.

Datalab and Cloud Monitoring

Monitoring uses Workspaces to organize resources contained in one or more Google Cloud projects. With a Workspace, you can, among other things, create alerts and dashboards, and configure groups.

You must create a Workspace to use groups with Datalab. To create a Workspace, go to Monitoring:

Go to Monitoring

If your Google Cloud project is already associated with a Workspace, then the Cloud Monitoring home page is displayed. Otherwise, a Workspace is created automatically. In general, this process requires no interaction from you, but it takes a few moments to complete. In some cases, the Add your project to a Workspace dialog is displayed. In this case, the select the option to create a new Workspace. For details, see Workspaces.

Monitoring tutorials

Datalab is installed with several Monitoring interactive tutorials:

Getting started
Shows how to import the Python Google Cloud's operations suite API into Datalab and set your default Google Cloud project ID. There is sample code that calls the API and retrieves monitoring data from your project.
Group metrics
Shows how to look at the group structure in a project and how to use groups to filter and aggregate metric data. To use group metrics, you must have a Workspace. If your Workspace doesn't have groups, change to another Workspace that does. For details more details, see Workspaces.
Time-shifted data
Shows how to transform time series data in interesting ways. Since your project might not have enough VM instances to be a good example, the tutorial is set up to optionally use previously-extracted data from a demonstration project.

You can run the tutorials, and optionally modify them, as explained in the following section.

Running the tutorials

To run the tutorials, do the following:

  1. Click on docs, tutorials, and Stackdriver Monitoring in the Datalab interface. You should see the following page:

    Stackdriver tutorials

  2. Select the tutorial. Click on the name of the tutorial you want to run.

  3. Set the project ID: Edit the cell containing set_datalab_project_id('my-project-id') as follows:

    • If you created a Workspace, replace my-project-id with your Workspace name. You must have a Workspace to use group metrics.
    • If you don't have a Workspace, replace my-project-id with your Google Cloud project ID.

  4. Run the tutorial code. From the menu bar at the top of the interface, select Run > Run all cells. This reruns all the code in the tutorial using your current project ID.

Feel free to modify the code in the tutorials and try out your changes. You can run the code in a single cell by clicking on the cell and choosing Run from the menu to the left of the cell. You can also create your own notebooks.

Clean up

To avoid incurring charges to your Google Cloud account for the resources used in this quickstart, follow these steps.

  1. Click on the Running Sessions icon at the top-right of the Datalab interface, and shut down any notebooks you are not using. You can restart them later if you need to. Close the associated browser tabs or windows.

  2. Enter CTRL-C in the window where Datalab is running and close the Datalab tab in your browser.

  3. You incur charges from the time of creation to the time of deletion of the Datalab VM instance (see Cloud Datalab Pricing). You are also charged for the Persistent Disk where notebooks are stored. The Persistent Disk remains after the deletion of the Datalab VM until you delete it.

    To delete the Datalab VM instance and its Persistent Disk, run the following: 

    datalab delete --delete-disk [DATALAB-INSTANCE-NAME]

  4. There are additional resources are created by the datalab create command that are reused by other Datalab instances that you create. You can run the following commands to delete the additional resources listed below if you don't expect to create additional Datalab instances:

    • Delete the datalab-network-allow-ssh firewall rule, which allows SSH connections to your Datalab instances: 
      gcloud compute firewall-rules delete datalab-network-allow-ssh
    • Delete the datalab-network Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) network, to which Datalab instances are connected by default: 
      gcloud compute networks delete datalab-network
    • Delete the datalab-notebooks Cloud Source Repository, which is set up for you to store your notebooks (see Working with notebooks if you wish to backup notebooks before deleting the repo): 
      gcloud source repos delete datalab-notebooks

  5. If you created any Workspaces, projects, or VM instances that you don't want to keep, remove them.

What's next

See the following API reference material: