Monitor Application Load Balancer plugins

This page describes how you can use Cloud Monitoring dashboards to view metrics for Application Load Balancer plugins that are configured using Service Extensions. You can monitor plugins from either the plugin perspective or the load balancer perspective.

For a product overview, see Service Extensions overview.

Monitoring from a plugins perspective

This section describes Service Extensions monitoring from a plugins perspective.

For detailed information about Service Extensions metric types, see the Google Cloud metrics page.

View the Monitoring dashboard for Service Extensions

To view the Monitoring dashboard for Service Extensions, do the following:

  1. In the Google Cloud console, go to the Service Extensions page.

    Go to Service Extensions

  2. Click the Plugins tab.
  3. Click a plugin name.
  4. On the Plugin details page, click the Monitoring tab.

    5. On the Monitoring page, the metrics charts show information that can help you monitor plugin performance.

  5. To view the metrics for plugin lifecycle operations, select values from the Operation filter list. By default, the values HTTP request header and HTTP response header are selected.
  6. To view the metrics for a specific plugin version, select a value from the Plugin version filter list. By default, metrics are displayed for all versions.
  7. To change the period for which you want to view the data, either select a predefined period from the time selector or click Custom and define a start and end time. By default, the selector is set to 1 day.

Plugin metrics for Service Extensions

You can monitor the following metrics for plugins from the Service Extensions perspective. These metrics have the prefix networkservices.googleapis.com/wasm_plugin/. The prefix is omitted from the entries in the table.

Metric type Display name
Kind, Type, Unit
Description
invocation_count Wasm plugin invocation count
DELTA, INT64, 1
The number of invocations of the plugin over the selected time span. Each plugin callback invocation counts as a separate plugin invocation.
invocation_latencies Wasm plugin invocation latency
DELTA, DISTRIBUTION, us
The local execution time, in milliseconds, of the plugin. The metric includes label-delineated entries for each callback.
cpu/usage_times Wasm plugin CPU usage
DELTA, DISTRIBUTION, us{CPU}
The CPU usage time of plugin invocations, in microseconds.
memory/max_bytes_used Wasm plugin memory usage
GAUGE, INT64, By
The average of the peak memory allocation across hosts for plugin invocations, in bytes. For each host, the peak memory allocation is measured since the plugin started running on the host.

Monitoring from the load balancer perspective

This section describes Service Extensions monitoring for plugins from the load balancer perspective.

View the Monitoring dashboard for Cloud Load Balancing

Application Load Balancers export monitoring data to Cloud Monitoring.

Use Monitoring metrics for the following purposes:

  • Evaluating a load balancer's configuration, usage, and performance
  • Troubleshooting problems
  • Improving resource utilization and user experience

To view a predefined dashboard, follow these steps:

  1. In the Google Cloud console, go to the Dashboards overview page.

    Go to Dashboards overview

  2. In the Categories section, click GCP.
    • To view a list of dashboards for all your load balancers, in the GCP Dashboards list, click the dashboard named Google Cloud Load Balancers. To view a specific load balancer's dashboard, locate the load balancer in the list and click its name.
    • To view the predefined dashboards for only your load balancers, select the appropriate dashboard.

In addition to the predefined dashboards in Monitoring, you can create custom dashboards, set up alerts, and query the metrics through the Cloud Monitoring API.

For more information, see the "Monitor and troubleshoot" pages of the Cloud Load Balancing documentation—for example, Internal Application Load Balancer logging and monitoring.

Plugin metrics for Cloud Load Balancing

You can monitor the following metrics for plugins from a Cloud Load Balancing perspective.

These metrics have the prefix loadbalancing.googleapis.com/. The prefix is omitted from the entries in the table.

Metric type Display name
Kind, Type, Unit
Description
https/backend_request_count,
https/external/regional/backend_request_count,
https/internal/backend_request_count 		Backend request count
DELTA, INT64, 1
The number of times that a plugin is called from the Application Load Balancer.
https/backend_request_bytes_count,
https/external/regional/backend_request_bytes_count,
https/internal/backend_request_bytes_count 		Backend request bytes
DELTA, INT64, By
The number of bytes sent from the load balancer to the plugin.
https/backend_response_bytes_count,
https/external/regional/backend_response_bytes_count,
https/internal/backend_response_bytes_count 		Backend response bytes
DELTA, INT64, By
The number of bytes received by the load balancer from the extension backend.

View plugin metrics

To view the metrics of a specific plugin, do the following:

  1. In the Google Cloud console, go to the Metrics explorer page.

    Go to Metrics explorer

  2. In the Metric element, expand the Select a metric menu. Then, do the following:

    1. From the list of resources, select the appropriate Application Load Balancer rule.

    2. From metric categories list, select Https.

    3. From the list of metrics, select a plugin metric.

    4. Click Apply.

  3. In the Filter element, do the following:

    1. Select the backend_target_type label and set the value to WASM_PLUGIN.

    2. Select the backend_target_name label and set the plugin name as the value.

For more information about load balancer metric types, see the loadbalancing section of the Google Cloud metrics page.

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