This document describes how to use the Cloud Monitoring console to monitor your Cloud Spanner instances.
The Cloud Monitoring console provides several monitoring tools for Cloud Spanner:
- A curated dashboard, which shows pre-made charts for your Cloud Spanner resources
- Custom charts, including ad-hoc charts in the Metrics Explorer as well as charts in custom dashboards
- Alerts, which notify you if a metric exceeds a threshold that you specify
If you prefer to monitor Cloud Spanner programmatically, use the Cloud Client Libraries for Cloud Monitoring to retrieve metrics.
Using the Cloud Monitoring curated dashboard
Cloud Monitoring provides you with a curated dashboard that summarizes key information about your Cloud Spanner instances, including:
- Incidents: User-created monitoring alerts that are open, active, or resolved
- Events: A list of Cloud Spanner audit logs (if enabled and available)
- Instances: A high-level summary of your Cloud Spanner instances, including compute capacity, database count, and instance health
- Aggregated charts of throughput and storage use
To view the Cloud Spanner dashboard, do the following:
In the Google Cloud console, select Monitoring, or use the following button:
If Resources is shown in the navigation pane, then select Resources and then select Cloud Spanner. Otherwise, select Dashboards and then select the dashboard named Cloud Spanner.
Viewing instance and database details
When you open the curated dashboard for Cloud Spanner, it shows aggregated data for all of your instances. You can view more details about a specific instance by clicking the instance's name under Instances.
The dashboard displays information such as instance metadata, databases in the instance, and charts of various metrics broken down by region.
From the instance dashboard page, you can also see charts for a specific database in the instance:
On the right-hand side, above the instance metrics charts, click Database metrics.
In the Select a breakdown drop-down list, select the database that you want to examine.
The Monitoring console displays charts for the database.
Creating custom charts for Cloud Spanner metrics
You can use Cloud Monitoring to create custom charts for Cloud Spanner metrics. You can use the Metrics Explorer to create temporary, ad-hoc charts, or you can create charts that appear on custom dashboards.
In particular, Cloud Monitoring enables you to create a custom chart that shows whether two or more metrics are correlated with each other. For example, you can check for a correlation between CPU utilization and latency in a Cloud Spanner instance, which might indicate that your instance needs more compute capacity or that some of your queries are causing high CPU utilization.
To get started with this example, follow these steps:
In the Google Cloud console, select Monitoring, or use the following button:
If Metrics Explorer is shown in the navigation pane, select it. Otherwise, select Resources and then select Metrics Explorer.
Click the View options tab, then select the Log scale on Y-axis checkbox. This option helps you compare multiple metrics when one metric has much larger values than the others.
In the drop-down list above the right pane, select Line.
Click the Metrics tab. You can now add metrics to the chart.
To add latency metrics to the chart, follow these steps:
- In the Find resource type and metric box, enter the value
spanner.googleapis.com/api/request_latencies
, then click the row that appears below the box. - In the Filter box, enter the value
instance_id
, then enter the instance ID you want to examine and click Apply. - In the Aggregator drop-down list, click max.
Optional: Change the latency percentile:
- Click Show advanced options.
Click the Aligner drop-down list, then click the latency percentile that you want to view.
In most cases, you should look at either the 50th percentile latency, to understand the typical amount of latency, or the 99th percentile latency, to understand the latency for the slowest 1% of requests.
To add CPU utilization metrics to the chart, follow these steps:
- Click Add metric.
- In the Find resource type and metric box, enter the value
spanner.googleapis.com/instance/cpu/utilization
, then click the row that appears below the box. - In the Filter box, enter the value
instance_id
, then enter the instance ID you want to examine and click Apply. - In the Aggregator drop-down list, click max.
You now have a chart that shows the CPU utilization and latency metrics for a Cloud Spanner instance. If both metrics are higher than expected at the same time, you can take additional steps to correct the issue.
For more information about creating custom charts, see the Cloud Monitoring documentation.
Creating alerts for Cloud Spanner metrics
When you create a Cloud Spanner instance, you choose the compute capacity for the instance. As the instance's workload changes, Cloud Spanner does not automatically adjust compute capacity of the instance. As a result, you need to set up several alerts to ensure that the instance stays within the recommended maximums for CPU utilization and the recommended limit for storage.
The following examples show how to set up alerting policies for some Cloud Spanner metrics. For a full list of available metrics, see metrics list for Cloud Spanner.
High-priority CPU
To create an alerting policy that triggers when your high priority cpu utilization for Cloud Spanner is above a recommended threshold, use the following settings.
New condition Field |
Value |
---|---|
Resource and Metric | In the Resources menu, select Cloud Spanner Instance. In the Metric categories menu, select Instance. In the Metrics menu, select CPU Utilization by priority. (The metric.type is spanner.googleapis.com/instance/cpu/utilization_by_priority ).
|
Filter | instance_id = YOUR_INSTANCE_ID priority = high
|
Across time series Time series group by |
location for multi-region instances; leave it blank for regional instances. |
Across time series Time series aggregation |
sum |
Rolling window | 10 m |
Rolling window function | mean |
Configure alert trigger Field |
Value |
---|---|
Condition type | Threshold |
Alert trigger | Any time series violates |
Threshold position | Above threshold |
Threshold value | 45% for multi-region instances; 65% for regional instances.
|
Retest window | 10 minutes |
24 hour rolling average CPU
To create an alerting policy that triggers when the 24 hour rolling average of your cpu utilization for Cloud Spanner is above a recommended threshold, use the following settings.
New condition Field |
Value |
---|---|
Resource and Metric | In the Resources menu, select Cloud Spanner Instance. In the Metric categories menu, select Instance. In the Metrics menu, select Smoothed CPU utilization. (The metric.type is spanner.googleapis.com/instance/cpu/smoothed_utilization ).
|
Filter | instance_id = YOUR_INSTANCE_ID |
Across time series Time series aggregation |
sum |
Rolling window | 10 m |
Rolling window function | mean |
Configure alert trigger Field |
Value |
---|---|
Condition type | Threshold |
Alert trigger | Any time series violates |
Threshold position | Above threshold |
Threshold | 90%
|
Retest window | 10 minutes |
Storage
To create an alerting policy that triggers when your storage for your Cloud Spanner instance is above a recommended threshold, use the following settings.
New condition Field |
Value |
---|---|
Resource and Metric | In the Resources menu, select Cloud Spanner Instance. In the Metric categories menu, select Instance. In the Metrics menu, select Storage used. (The metric.type is spanner.googleapis.com/instance/storage/used_bytes ).
|
Filter | instance_id = YOUR_INSTANCE_ID |
Across time series Time series aggregation |
sum |
Rolling window | 10 m |
Rolling window function | max |
Configure alert trigger Field |
Value |
---|---|
Condition type | Threshold |
Condition triggers if | Any time series violates |
Threshold position | Above threshold |
Threshold value | Set the threshold to 75% of the maximum storage per node, multiplied by the number of nodes. For the current node limits, see Cloud Spanner Quotas & limits. |
Retest window | 10 minutes |
What's next
- Understand the CPU utilization and latency metrics for Cloud Spanner.
- Use the console to get a quick view of the most important metrics for your instance.
- Learn more about Cloud Monitoring.