Network Intelligence Center provides a single console for managing Google Cloud network visibility, monitoring, and troubleshooting. It enables you to monitor your networks in the following ways:
- View the topology of your network infrastructure and deployments.
- Check connectivity between network endpoints.
- View the performance of your entire Google Cloud network and the performance of your project's resources.
- Get insights, recommendations, and metrics about your firewall rules.
- Automatically monitor your Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) network configurations and detect misconfigurations and suboptimal configurations.
Network Topology
Network Topology is a visualization tool that shows the topology of your network infrastructure:
- Infrastructure view: Shows Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) networks, hybrid connectivity to and from your on-premises networks, connectivity to Google-managed services, and the associated metrics.
- GKE view (preview): Shows the infrastructure of your Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) deployments: clusters, namespaces, workloads, and pods, and their associated metrics.
You can also view metrics and details of network traffic to other Shared VPC networks and inter-region traffic. Network Topology combines configuration information with real-time operational data in a single view. This view makes it easier to understand networking relationships between various workloads on Google Cloud and their current state, such as the traffic paths and throughput between virtual machine (VM) instances.
For more information, see the Network Topology overview.
Connectivity Tests
Connectivity Tests is a diagnostics tool that lets you check connectivity between network endpoints. It analyzes your configuration and, in some cases, performs live data plane analysis between the endpoints. An endpoint is a source or destination of network traffic, such as a VM, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) cluster, load balancer forwarding rule, or an IP address on the internet.
To analyze network configurations, Connectivity Tests simulates the expected forwarding path of a packet through your Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) network, Cloud VPN tunnels, or VLAN attachments. Connectivity Tests can also simulate the expected inbound forwarding path to resources in your VPC network.
For some connectivity scenarios, Connectivity Tests also performs live data plane analysis. This feature sends packets over the data plane to validate connectivity and provides baseline diagnostics of latency and packet loss. If the route is supported for the feature, each test that you run includes a live data plane analysis result.
For more information, see the Connectivity Tests overview.
Performance Dashboard
Performance Dashboard gives you visibility into the performance of the entire Google Cloud network, as well as to the performance of your project's resources.
With these performance-monitoring capabilities, you can distinguish between a problem in your application and a problem in the underlying Google Cloud network. You can also investigate historical network performance problems.
For more information, see the Performance Dashboard overview.
Firewall Insights
Firewall Insights helps you understand and optimize your firewall rules. It provides insights, recommendations, and metrics about how your firewall rules are being used. Firewall Insights also uses machine learning to predict future firewall rules usage.
Firewall Insights lets you make better decisions during firewall rule optimization. For example, Firewall Insights identifies rules that it classifies as overly permissive. You can use this information to make your firewall configuration stricter.
For more information, see the Firewall Insights overview.
Network Analyzer
Network Analyzer automatically monitors your Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) network configurations and detects misconfigurations and suboptimal configurations. It provides insights about network topology, firewall rules, routes, configuration dependencies, and connectivity to services and applications. It identifies network failures, provides root cause information, and suggests possible resolutions.
Network Analyzer runs continuously and triggers relevant analyses based on near real-time configuration updates in your network. If a network failure is detected, it tries to correlate the failure with recent configuration changes to identify root causes. Wherever possible, it provides recommendations to suggest details about how to fix the issues.
For more information, see the Network Analyzer overview.
Flow Analyzer
Flow Analyzer (preview) lets you quickly and efficiently understand your VPC traffic flows without the need to write complex SQL queries for analyzing VPC Flow Logs. Flow Analyzer lets you perform opinionated network traffic analysis with 5-tuple granularity (source IP, destination IP, source port, destination port, and protocol).
Developed using Log Analytics and powered by BigQuery, Flow Analyzer enables in-depth analysis of inbound and outbound traffic of your VM instances. It lets you monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize your networking deployment for better performance and enhanced security which helps ensure compliance, and save on costs.
Flow Analyzer analyzes VPC Flow Logs data stored in a log bucket (record format). To use Flow Analyzer, you must select a project with a log bucket that contains VPC Flow Logs. For more information, see the VPC Flow Logs overview. VPC Flow Logs can be used for network monitoring, forensics, real-time security analysis, and expense optimization.
For more information, see the Flow Analyzer overview.