Overview
Key Visualizer is enabled by default.
There are some situations in which data may not be immediately available in Key Visualizer.
- Storage and traffic statistics for newly created databases may not be available immediately.
- Traffic statistics for newly inserted rows may be attributed to existing key ranges.
The Key Visualizer interface
The Key Visualizer tool is accessed from the Google Cloud console.
To access Key Visualizer:
From the Spanner page of the Google Cloud console, select an instance.
Select a database to investigate.
In the left navigation menu, under Observability, select Key Visualizer.
Disable Key Visualizer
Key Visualizer enablement is controlled by the enable_key_visualizer
database option. The default value is true.
To disable Key Visualizer, set the value of the enable_key_visualizer
database option to false. The DDL syntax to disable Key Visualizer
is:
ALTER DATABASE `database_id` SET OPTIONS (enable_key_visualizer=false)
If your database ID contains characters other than letters, numbers, or underscores, be sure to enclose the ID with backticks (``).
The statement can be sent using a gcloud command, or in an UpdateDatabaseDdl
gRPC/REST request. For example:
gcloud spanner databases ddl update database_id --instance=instance_id \
--ddl='ALTER DATABASE `database_id` SET OPTIONS ( enable_key_visualizer=false )'
Once you've explicitly set the value for enable_key_visualizer, you can check
its value by clicking SHOW EQUIVALENT DDL in the overview page, or using the
ddl describe gcloud command:
gcloud spanner databases ddl describe `database_id` --instance=instance_id
Re-enable Key Visualizer
To re-enable Key Visualizer, follow the instructions in
Disable Key Visualizer, setting the value of the
enable_key_visualizer database option to true.
When first re-enabled for a database, the Key Visualizer heatmap will be empty for the first few minutes while Cloud Spanner collects metrics.
What's next
- Learn to recognize common patterns in heatmaps.
- Find out how to explore a heatmap in depth.
- Read about the metrics you can view in a heatmap.