Monitor connections

To help you monitor connections, Cloud Interconnect reports metrics to Cloud Monitoring. Monitoring these metrics can help you troubleshoot issues with your physical circuits (Cloud Interconnect connections) or VLAN attachments.

For Dedicated Interconnect, Cloud Interconnect reports measurements for the connections and VLAN attachments. For Partner Interconnect, Cloud Interconnect reports measurements for VLAN attachments only.

Google starts reporting Cloud Interconnect connection metrics after Google allocates your ports, even before your connection is ready to use. That way, you can monitor the circuits while they're being set up and tested.

Google starts reporting VLAN attachment metrics right after you create the attachment. Google reports the number of packets and bytes sent and received.

Data is reported in one-minute intervals to Monitoring and is retained in Monitoring for 6 weeks.

Metrics and resource types

For more information about Cloud Interconnect metrics, see the following links from the Cloud Monitoring documentation:

View metrics in the Google Cloud console

On the Cloud Interconnect page in the Google Cloud console, you can view the activity for VLAN attachments and Dedicated Interconnect connections.

Console

To view the monitoring information for a Dedicated Interconnect connection, follow these steps:

In the Google Cloud console, go to the Cloud Interconnect Physical connections tab.

Go to Physical connections
Select the connection to view.
On the Interconnect connection details page, select the Monitoring tab.

For Dedicated Interconnect connections, the Google Cloud console shows the following activity for the selected timeframe (by default, the Google Cloud console shows the past hour's activity):
- Utilization rate (bytes received and sent) compared to its overall capacity.
- Received bytes by VLAN attachment.
- Sent bytes by VLAN attachment.
- Number of outbound drops and number of inbound and outbound errors.
- Light levels for Tx and Rx optical power. For 100-Gbps circuits, four light levels are published, one for each of the wavelengths used.

To view the monitoring information for a VLAN attachment, follow these steps:

In the Google Cloud console, go to the Cloud Interconnect VLAN attachments tab.

Go to VLAN attachments
Select the VLAN attachment to view.
On the VLAN attachment details page, select the Monitoring tab.

For each VLAN attachment, the Google Cloud console shows the bytes received and sent compared to its total capacity for the selected timeframe (by default, the Google Cloud console shows the past hour's activity).

View metrics in Cloud Monitoring

Console

To view the metrics for a monitored resource by using the Metrics Explorer, do the following:

In the Google Cloud console, go to the Metrics explorer page:
Go to Metrics explorer

If you use the search bar to find this page, then select the result whose subheading is Monitoring.
In the Metric element, expand the Select a metric menu, enter Interconnect in the filter bar, and then use the submenus to select a specific resource type and metric:
1. In the Active resources menu, select interconnect.
2. To select a metric, use the Active metric categories and Active metrics menus. For a list of metrics, see interconnect metrics.
3. Click Apply.
To remove time series from the display, use the Filter element.
To combine time series, use the menus on the Aggregation element. For example, to display the CPU utilization for your VMs, based on their zone, set the first menu to Mean and the second menu to zone.

All time series are displayed when the first menu of the Aggregation element is set to Unaggregated. The default settings for the Aggregation element are determined by the metric type you selected.
For quota and other metrics that report one sample per day, do the following:
1. In the Display pane, set the Widget type to Stacked bar chart.
2. Set the time period to at least one week.

Define alerting policies

Console

You can create alerting policies to monitor the values of metrics and to notify you when those metrics violate a condition.

In the Google Cloud console, go to the Alerting page:
Go to Alerting

If you use the search bar to find this page, then select the result whose subheading is Monitoring.
If you haven't created your notification channels and if you want to be notified, then click Edit Notification Channels and add your notification channels. Return to the Alerting page after you add your channels.
From the Alerting page, select Create policy.
To select the metric, expand the Select a metric menu and then do the following:
1. To limit the menu to relevant entries, enter Interconnect into the filter bar. If there are no results after you filter the menu, then disable the Show only active resources & metrics toggle.
2. For the Resource type, select Interconnect.
3. For the Metric category, select Network.
4. For the Metric, select a metric from the list of interconnect metrics.
5. Select Apply.
Click Next.
The settings in the Configure alert trigger page determine when the alert is triggered. Select a condition type and, if necessary, specify a threshold. For more information, see Create metric-threshold alerting policies.
Click Next.
Optional: To add notifications to your alerting policy, click Notification channels. In the dialog, select one or more notification channels from the menu, and then click OK.
Optional: Update the Incident autoclose duration. This field determines when Monitoring closes incidents in the absence of metric data.
Optional: Click Documentation, and then add any information that you want included in a notification message.
Click Alert name and enter a name for the alerting policy.
Click Create Policy.

For more information, see Alerting policies.

Create custom Monitoring dashboards

You can create custom Monitoring dashboards over Cloud Interconnect metrics by adding custom charts.

Console

To create custom Monitoring dashboards, follow these steps:

In the Google Cloud console, go to the Monitoring page.

Go to Monitoring
Select Dashboards, and then click Create dashboard.
Name the dashboard, and then click Add chart.
Specify a name for the chart.
Select the metrics and filters to use. For a list of Cloud Interconnect resource types and metrics that you can monitor, see Monitored resource types or Metrics list.
Click Save.

View metrics in Network Topology

You can use Network Topology to audit your networking configuration and troubleshoot networking issues.

Network Topology overlays throughput values on each connection so that you can quickly see the amount of traffic between entities. For example, you can see the traffic traversing the VLAN attachment that connects Google Cloud to an on-premises network.

For information about the supported metrics for each connection, see the Metrics reference.

Metric values are based on the final five minutes of the selected hour. You can also view historical date for six weeks by clicking on any of the edges.

For more information, see Data collection and freshness.

Console

In the Google Cloud console, go to the Network Topology page.
Go to Network Topology
In the entities selection pane, select a metric from the Edge metric drop-down menu.
Navigate to a specific entity hierarchy to view traffic that is related to that entity.

For example, if you want to view traffic bandwidth traversing the VLAN attachment between Google Cloud and the on-premises network, expand the entities until you see that connection.
Click the entity to highlight all of its traffic paths.

Network Topology displays metric values for each connection that supports the selected metric.

What's next

To query and view metrics for your connections and VLAN attachments, see the Cloud Monitoring API.
To view records of samples of packets sent through VLAN attachments, see VPC Flow Logs.
To learn more about Cloud Interconnect options, see the Cloud Interconnect overview.
To help you solve common issues that you might encounter when using Cloud Interconnect, see Troubleshooting.