Cloud Asset Inventory overview

Cloud Asset Inventory is a global metadata inventory service that lets you view, search, export, monitor, and analyze your Google Cloud asset metadata, with up to 35 days of create, update, and delete history. Assets that haven't changed in the past 35 days report their latest status.

Asset metadata can come from the following places:

  • Google Cloud resources, such as Compute Engine VM instances, Cloud Storage buckets, and App Engine instances.

  • Policies set on Google Cloud resources, such as IAM policies, organization policies, and Access Context Manager policies.

  • Runtime information from OS inventory management.

Here's how you can work with your assets:

Asset types, asset names, and content types

Cloud Asset Inventory offers multiple methods to interact with your assets. Depending on the method you use and the response detail you want, you might need to specify asset types, asset names, and content types in your requests.

Asset types

Some Cloud Asset Inventory methods return results based on asset types. Asset types include Google Cloud resources, policies, OS inventory runtime information, and relationships. The available asset types and the Cloud Asset Inventory methods that support them are detailed in Asset types.

Asset names

Some Cloud Asset Inventory methods return results based on asset names. When specifying an asset name, you must use its full resource name. See Asset names for a list of full resource names.

Content types

You can request additional metadata on a resource by specifying a metadata content type. If you don't specify a content type, then only a basic response is returned, containing information such as the asset name, the last time it was updated, and what projects, folders, and organizations it belongs to.

Content type names differ depending on how you interact with Cloud Asset Inventory. The RPC and REST API names are the same. However, the gcloud CLI content type names follow a different pattern. For consistency and ease of explanation, the rest of this documentation refers to content types by their RPC and REST names.

The following table details the content types and their descriptions:

Content type Description
RPC and REST name gcloud CLI name  
ACCESS_POLICY access-policy The Access Context Manager policy set on an asset.
IAM_POLICY iam-policy The IAM policy metadata binding to the resource.
ORG_POLICY org-policy The organization policy metadata set on an asset. This content type outputs legacy organization policy v1. For organization policy v2, try the resource content type and a resource type of orgpolicy.googleapis.com/Policy.
OS_INVENTORY os-inventory The runtime OS inventory information. To enable OS inventory, complete the relevant steps in Set up VM Manager.
RELATIONSHIP relationship

Requires access to the Security Command Center Premium or Enterprise tier, or Gemini Cloud Assist.

Many Google Cloud assets are connected to each other by relationships. For example, a Compute instance group can contain a Compute instance, or a GKE cluster can contain a node.

Relationship data is available from May 30th, 2022. A relationship might have its own update timestamp, because it might be inferred at a different time than the source asset updates.

See Relationship types for a list of the supported relationships.
RESOURCE resource The resource's metadata.

How responses change with content type

The following examples show how responses change when listing VM instances in a project through Cloud Asset Inventory with different content types.

No content type

If you specify no content type when listing VM instances, you receive only the instance names, the last time they were updated, and what projects, folders, and organizations they belong to.

Expand for response example

---
ancestors:
- projects/PROJECT_NUMBER
- folders/FOLDER_NUMBER
- organizations/ORGANIZATION_ID
assetType: compute.googleapis.com/Instance
name: //compute.googleapis.com/projects/PROJECT_ID/zones/ZONE/instances/INSTANCE_NAME
updateTime: '2023-11-15T12:28:30.087825Z'

IAM_POLICY content type

If you specify the IAM_POLICY content type, you also receive the IAM bindings on the VM, if there are any.

Expand for response example

---
ancestors:
- projects/PROJECT_NUMBER
- folders/FOLDER_NUMBER
- organizations/ORGANIZATION_ID
assetType: compute.googleapis.com/Instance
iamPolicy:
  bindings:
  - members:
    - user:USER_EMAIL_ADDRESS
    role: roles/compute.securityAdmin
  etag: ETAG
name: //compute.googleapis.com/projects/PROJECT_ID/zones/ZONE/instances/INSTANCE_NAME
updateTime: '2023-12-19T23:35:42.673842Z'

RESOURCE content type

If you specify the RESOURCE content type, you also receive all the metadata associated with the VM.

Expand for response example

---
ancestors:
- projects/PROJECT_NUMBER
- folders/FOLDER_NUMBER
- organizations/ORGANIZATION_ID
assetType: compute.googleapis.com/Instance
name: //compute.googleapis.com/projects/PROJECT_ID/zones/ZONE/instances/INSTANCE_NAME
resource:
  data:
    allocationAffinity:
      consumeAllocationType: ANY_ALLOCATION
    canIpForward: false
    confidentialInstanceConfig:
      enableConfidentialCompute: true
    cpuPlatform: AMD Rome
    creationTimestamp: '2023-11-14T14:35:37.059-08:00'
    deletionProtection: false
    description: ''
    disks:
    - architecture: X86_64
      autoDelete: true
      boot: true
      deviceName: INSTANCE_NAME
      diskSizeGb: '10'
      guestOsFeatures:
      - type: VIRTIO_SCSI_MULTIQUEUE
      - type: SEV_CAPABLE
      - type: SEV_SNP_CAPABLE
      - type: SEV_LIVE_MIGRATABLE
      - type: UEFI_COMPATIBLE
      - type: GVNIC
      index: 0
      interface: NVME
      licenses:
      - https://www.googleapis.com/compute/v1/projects/ubuntu-os-cloud/global/licenses/ubuntu-2004-lts
      mode: READ_WRITE
      shieldedInstanceInitialState:
        dbx:
        - content: DATA
          fileType: BIN
        dbxs:
        - content: DATA
          fileType: BIN
      source: https://www.googleapis.com/compute/v1/projects/PROJECT_ID/zones/ZONE/disks/INSTANCE_NAME
      type: PERSISTENT
    displayDevice:
      enableDisplay: false
    fingerprint: FINGERPRINT
    id: 'ID'
    keyRevocationActionType: NONE_ON_KEY_REVOCATION
    labelFingerprint: LABEL_FINGERPRINT
    lastStartTimestamp: '2023-11-15T04:28:30.005-08:00'
    machineType: https://www.googleapis.com/compute/v1/projects/PROJECT_ID/zones/ZONE/machineTypes/n2d-standard-2
    name: INSTANCE_NAME
    networkInterfaces:
    - accessConfigs:
      - name: External NAT
        natIP: 34.27.105.222
        networkTier: PREMIUM
        type: ONE_TO_ONE_NAT
      fingerprint: jKU51FdTluk=
      name: nic0
      network: https://www.googleapis.com/compute/v1/projects/PROJECT_ID/global/networks/default
      networkIP: 10.128.15.212
      nicType: GVNIC
      stackType: IPV4_ONLY
      subnetwork: https://www.googleapis.com/compute/v1/projects/PROJECT_ID/regions/REGION/subnetworks/default
    reservationAffinity:
      consumeReservationType: ANY_ALLOCATION
    resourceStatus: {}
    scheduling:
      automaticRestart: true
      onHostMaintenance: TERMINATE
      preemptible: false
      provisioningModel: STANDARD
    selfLink: https://www.googleapis.com/compute/v1/projects/PROJECT_ID/zones/ZONE/instances/INSTANCE_NAME
    serviceAccounts:
    - email: PROJECT_NUMBER-compute@developer.gserviceaccount.com
      scopes:
      - https://www.googleapis.com/auth/devstorage.read_only
      - https://www.googleapis.com/auth/logging.write
      - https://www.googleapis.com/auth/monitoring.write
      - https://www.googleapis.com/auth/servicecontrol
      - https://www.googleapis.com/auth/service.management.readonly
      - https://www.googleapis.com/auth/trace.append
    shieldedInstanceConfig:
      enableIntegrityMonitoring: true
      enableSecureBoot: false
      enableVtpm: true
    shieldedInstanceIntegrityPolicy:
      updateAutoLearnPolicy: true
    startRestricted: false
    status: RUNNING
    tags:
      fingerprint: FINGERPRINT
    zone: https://www.googleapis.com/compute/v1/projects/PROJECT_ID/zones/ZONE
  discoveryDocumentUri: https://www.googleapis.com/discovery/v1/apis/compute/v1/rest
  discoveryName: Instance
  location: ZONE
  parent: //cloudresourcemanager.googleapis.com/projects/PROJECT_NUMBER
  version: v1
updateTime: '2023-11-15T12:28:30.087825Z'

RELATIONSHIP content type

Relationships require access to the Security Command Center Premium or Enterprise tier, or Gemini Cloud Assist.

If you specify the RELATIONSHIP content type, you also receive metadata associated with the VM instance's related assets.

Expand for response example

---
ancestors:
- projects/PROJECT_NUMBER
- folders/FOLDER_NUMBER
- organizations/ORGANIZATION_ID
assetType: compute.googleapis.com/Instance
name: //compute.googleapis.com/projects/PROJECT_ID/zones/ZONE/instances/INSTANCE_NAME
relatedAsset:
  ancestors:
  - projects/PROJECT_NUMBER
  - folders/FOLDER_NUMBER
  - organizations/ORGANIZATION_ID
  asset: //compute.googleapis.com/projects/PROJECT_ID/zones/ZONE/disks/INSTANCE_NAME
  assetType: compute.googleapis.com/Disk
  relationshipType: COMPUTE_INSTANCE_USE_DISK
updateTime: '2023-12-19T23:35:42.673842Z'

When using the RELATIONSHIP content type, instead of requesting all relationships, you can request specific relationship types.

Data freshness

Cloud Asset Inventory provides eventual consistency on current data and best-effort consistency on historical data. While rare, it's possible that Cloud Asset Inventory can miss some data updates.

Unless noted in the resource types table, almost all asset updates are available in minutes.

What's next