Create a Cloud Monitoring dashboard

Use the dashboard module to create a Cloud Monitoring dashboard for your high performance computing (HPC) cluster deployments.

This module provides a default dashboard layout that tracks key metrics for HPC workloads. You can also use the module to add custom widgets or start from an empty dashboard.

For the complete list of inputs and outputs, see the dashboard module in the Cluster Toolkit GitHub repository.

Before you begin

Before you begin, verify that you meet the following requirements:

  • You have installed and configured Cluster Toolkit. For installation instructions, see Set up Cluster Toolkit.
  • You have an existing cluster blueprint. You can use and modify an existing blueprint or create one from scratch. For a working example of a blueprint configured for the dashboard module, see the examples/hpc-enterprise-slurm.yaml file. For more information about creating and customizing blueprints, see Cluster blueprint.
  • To view a complete list of blueprints that support the dashboard module, go to the Cluster blueprint catalog page, click the Select software or resource menu and then select Cloud Monitoring dashboard.
  • The dashboard module does not create a continuous long-running workload or a full cluster. It provisions a Cloud Monitoring dashboard that monitors the performance and health of your cluster.

Required roles

To get the permissions that you need to create Cloud Monitoring dashboards, ask your administrator to grant you the Monitoring Editor (roles/monitoring.editor) IAM role on your project. For more information about granting roles, see Manage access to projects, folders, and organizations.

You might also be able to get the required permissions through custom roles or other predefined roles.

Create the default HPC dashboard

By default, the module creates a dashboard that is tailored for HPC workloads. To create this dashboard, add the dashboard module to your blueprint.

- id: hpc_dash
  source: modules/monitoring/dashboard

Create a dashboard with custom widgets

You can add custom widgets to the dashboard by using the widgets setting. This setting accepts a list of JSON strings, where each string represents a widget configuration.

The following example adds a text widget with Markdown content to the default HPC dashboard.

- id: hpc_dash
  source: modules/monitoring/dashboard
  settings:
    widgets:
    - |
      {
        "text": {
          "content": "## Cluster Overview\nThis dashboard tracks the core metrics for the production cluster.",
          "format": "MARKDOWN"
        },
        "title": "Welcome"
      }

Create an empty dashboard

If you prefer to build a dashboard entirely from scratch (programmatically or manually after deployment), then you can set the base_dashboard setting to a value of Empty.

- id: empty_dash
  source: modules/monitoring/dashboard
  settings:
    base_dashboard: Empty
    title: "My Custom Dashboard"

What's next