Observability overview

Cloud Service Mesh provides observability into the health and performance of your services. To obtain telemetry data, Cloud Service Mesh relies on sidecar proxies that you inject as a separate container into the same pods as your workloads. The proxies intercept all inbound and outbound HTTP traffic to the workloads and report the data to Cloud Service Mesh. With this system, service developers don't have to instrument their code to collect telemetry data.

Cloud Monitoring and Cloud Logging are enabled in your Google Cloud project when you install Cloud Service Mesh. To report telemetry data, each sidecar proxy that is injected into your service pods calls the Cloud Monitoring API and the Cloud Logging API. The telemetry data is automatically uploaded to the Cloud Service Mesh pages in the Google Cloud console. Note that metrics are displayed only for HTTP services on the Cloud Service Mesh pages in the Google Cloud console.

Cloud Service Mesh provides several preconfigured service dashboards in the Google Cloud console so you don't have to manually set up dashboards and charts. This detailed telemetry enables operators to observe service behavior, and empowers them to troubleshoot, maintain, and optimize their applications.

On the Cloud Service Mesh pages in the Google Cloud console, you can:

  • Get an overview of all services in your mesh, providing you critical, service-level metrics on three of the four golden signals of monitoring: latency, traffic, and errors.

  • Define, review, and set alerts against service level objectives (SLOs), which summarize your service's user-visible performance.

  • View metric charts for individual services and deeply analyze them with filtering and breakdowns, including by response code, protocol, destination pod, traffic source, and more.

  • Get detailed information about the endpoints for each service, and see how traffic is flowing between services, and what performance looks like for each communication edge.

  • Explore a service topology graph visualization that shows your mesh's services and their relationships.

What's next