Monitor VM metrics

Google Distributed Cloud (GDC) air-gapped lets you track virtual machine (VM) performance and resource utilization by using the VM metrics dashboard. You can view project-specific metric graphs to inspect workload health and diagnose infrastructure issues across your environment.

This document is for developers in the platform administrator or application operator groups who monitor VM metrics by using dashboards in a GDC environment. For more information, see Audiences for GDC air-gapped documentation. To learn more about collecting metrics, managing dashboards, or configuring alert rules, see Observability monitoring and visualizing and Alerting.

Before you begin

Request IAM roles

To monitor VM metrics with dashboards, contact your IAM Project Admin to request the appropriate monitoring role. Review the list of project-level predefined roles for monitoring resources for more information.

All roles must bind to the namespace of the project where the VM resides.

VM dashboard

Access the VM-level metrics dashboard from the following address:

https://GDC_HOST/PROJECT/grafana/d/vm-metrics/workload-vms

  • Replace GDC_HOST with your hostname.
  • Replace PROJECT with the name of your project.

The VM dashboard presents graphs that contain information regarding the following for each VM in each of your project namespaces:

These graph types are generated using the VM monitoring metrics. The metrics are named and described according to their type, labels, and meanings.

In the dashboard view, from the selection box at the beginning of the page, which is marked in the following image as "vm", choose the VM you want to observe. The image shows that vm1 was selected.

Choose the VM to view.

CPU

View the CPU utilization - the amount of time that each vCPU spends in different states. The graph displays information for each of the vCPUs specified by your machine type.

View CPU utilization

Memory

From the memory graph, view attributes like the total memory allocated to the VM, the amount of memory available, and the amount of memory your instances use.

View memory allocation and usage

Network

Use the Network page to view the following:

  • The number of packets received from and sent to the network.
  • The quantity of bytes received from and sent to the network.
  • The number of receive and transmit packets that have been dropped on virtual network interface card (vNIC) interfaces.
  • The network transmit error packet count.

View network data

Disk

View the Disk page to see the following:

  • A bytes count for reads from or writes to a disk
  • A count of write or read IO operations.
  • The cumulative time taken for a read or write operation:
    • The time the operation is in queue
    • The time spent actually executing the operation (disk busy)
  • Disk flush request numbers, and the time spent on cache flushing.

View disk data

Metrics list

To view a list of metrics definitions, see Virtual Machine Management (VMM) .