About Workload Manager Evaluation

Workload Manager uses a rule-based evaluation service to scan your workloads and to detect deviations from standards, rules, and best practices to improve system quality, reliability, and performance.

Workload Manager checks the state of your resources against up-to-date best practices for infrastructure, operating systems, and critical high-availability configurations. For identified issues, Workload Manager provides guidance to help you understand and resolve issues.

You can use Workload Manager to perform a one-time check or for ongoing evaluation of workloads that might drift after system upgrades or other operational activities.

Summary of benefits

  • Improve system quality: Workload Manager provides initial and ongoing evaluation of infrastructure configuration, high-availability setup, and operating system configurations to help you improve workload reliability and prevent issues before they impact your business-critical applications.

  • Lower operational overhead: Workload Manager provides at scale validation to provide confidence in your deployments and automate operational processes for detecting configuration drift.

  • Save time during troubleshooting: Workload Manager automates configuration checks to help you identify causes of issues affecting workload performance or reliability.

Supported workloads

Workload Manager supports evaluating the following workloads:

Evaluate other workload types using custom rules

You can define organizational best practices for your workloads using custom rules written in the Rego policy language. Workload Manager evaluates your workloads against these rules and creates reports for any violation and helps you prioritize remediation. For more information, see About custom rules.

How to evaluate a workload

Before you can evaluate a workload against best practices, you must specify the projects that contain the resources to evaluate, and specify the best practices to evaluate the workload against.

To evaluate different sets of resources against different best practices, such as resources from different business units or from different applications, create multiple workload evaluations.

After you create a workload evaluation, you can run it. When you run a workload evaluation, Workload Manager uses data from Cloud Asset Inventory and Cloud Monitoring to analyze the resources you specified when in the workload evaluation against selected best practices.

Workload Manager evaluates resources against best practices by comparing the current state of the resource with the best practice. After the comparison, resources that do not comply with a selected best practice are marked with one of three severity levels. The severity level shows how far a resource is out of compliance from the best practice.

The Google Cloud console marks each resource that is out of compliance with an icon. The following table shows these icons, the corresponding severity level, how the current resource setting might be impacting the workload, and a recommendation for how soon you should modify the resource to adhere to the best practice.

Icon Severity level Impacts Recommendation
Medium Performance, supportability Resolve at your earliest convenience.
High Performance, stability Resolve during the next planned maintenance window.
Critical Reliability, unsupported configuration

Resolve as soon as possible to prevent an impact on system availability due to an unplanned outage.

A best practice with this severity might indicate a setting that doesn't allow for certain levels of support.

What's next