View and customize VM dashboards

View and customize VM dashboards

Learn how to view and customize dashboards for your Compute Engine virtual machine (VM) instances by completing the following tasks:

1. Create a Compute Engine VM instance.
2. View the default dashboard.
3. Customize the default dashboard.
4. Clean up.

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To follow step-by-step guidance for this task directly in the Google Cloud console, click Guide me:

Guide me

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Before you begin

1. Sign in to your Google Cloud account. If you're new to Google Cloud, create an account to evaluate how our products perform in real-world scenarios. New customers also get $300 in free credits to run, test, and deploy workloads.

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

   Note: If you don't plan to keep the resources that you create in this procedure, create a project instead of selecting an existing project. After you finish these steps, you can delete the project, removing all resources associated with the project.

   Go to project selector

3. Make sure that billing is enabled for your Google Cloud project.

4. Enable the Compute Engine and Cloud Monitoring APIs.

   Enable the APIs

5. In the Google Cloud console, on the project selector page, select or create a Google Cloud project.

   Note: If you don't plan to keep the resources that you create in this procedure, create a project instead of selecting an existing project. After you finish these steps, you can delete the project, removing all resources associated with the project.

   Go to project selector

6. Make sure that billing is enabled for your Google Cloud project.

7. Enable the Compute Engine and Cloud Monitoring APIs.

   Enable the APIs

Create a VM instance

Create a VM instance if you don't already have one:

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

   Go to VM instances

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

2. Create a VM by clicking Create instance.

3. In the Name field, enter a descriptive name.
4. In the Machine type field, select e2-small.
5. In the Boot disk section, keep the default setting of Debian GNU/Linux.
6. Click Create.

View the VM's observability dashboard

The observability dashboard displays utilization metrics, throughput metrics, and data about logs:

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

   Go to VM instances

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

2. In the VM instances page, click the instance name.

3. Select the Observability tab.

   If you created a VM, then it might take a few minutes before the charts display data.

4. Explore the charts on the Observability tab.

Create a custom observability dashboard

To create an editable copy of the observability dashboard, do the following:

1. In the Observability toolbar, click Save as dashboard.
2. Click Submit.

3. Click View in Monitoring.

   To add a widget, click Add widget and complete the dialog. For example, to view your logs with your metric data, click Add widget, select Logs, and then click Apply.

   To remove or modify a widget, use the options in the toolbar of the widget.

   To reposition or resize a widget, use your pointer.

4. If you modified the copy, then click Save.

5. In the navigation pane, select Dashboards.

   In the All Dashboards pane, you see your new dashboard listed with the type of Custom.

You have successfully customized the observability dashboard for a Compute Engine VM instance. You can use the same procedure to customize dashboards for many other Google Cloud resources.

View VM dashboards created by Monitoring

Cloud Monitoring creates and manages several dashboards that display metrics for your VM instances. You can access these dashboards from the Dashboards page in Cloud Monitoring:

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. To view instance-specific dashboards, in the All Dashboards pane, click VM Instances.

   The VM instances page lists your VMs and contains links to VM-specific dashboards. These dashboards are created and managed by Cloud Monitoring.

3. To view the metrics for all of your VMs, in the navigation pane, select Dashboards, and then select the GCE VM Instance Monitoring dashboard.

   To create an editable copy of this dashboard, click Copy Dashboard.

Clean up

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

If you created a new project and you no longer need the project, then delete the project.

If you used an existing project, then do the following:

1. If you created a VM, then delete it:

   1. In the Google Cloud console, go to the VM instances page.

      Go to VM instances

   2. Select the checkbox for the instance that you want to delete.
   3. To delete the instance, click More actions, click Delete, and then follow the instructions.

2. Delete the dashboard you created:

   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. Find the dashboard that you created, and then click Delete.

What's next

• To learn how to install the Ops Agent and collect metrics from an Apache server, see the quickstart Collect Apache metrics with the Ops Agent.

• To learn how to test whether a URL is responding to requests and to simulate a failure, see the quickstart Get notified if your application stops responding.

• To learn about testing your applications, see Synthetic monitoring overview.

• To learn about the Ops Agent, see Ops Agent overview.

• To learn about creating custom dashboards, see Manage custom dashboards.