This document describes the options you have when you want to view, explore, or analyze your telemetry data. You can, for example, view the dashboards that Google Cloud Observability creates when you use Google Cloud services. When you are troubleshooting issues, pages like the Logs Explorer, Metrics Explorer, and the Trace Explorer can help you understand how your services are operating.
Predefined dashboards
When you create a resource like a Compute Engine virtual machine (VM), Google Cloud Observability automatically creates and installs a dashboard in your project. These dashboards display metric data and general information about the resources that you use. To view your dashboards, go to the Dashboards page in the Google Cloud console:
If you register applications with App Hub, then you can use dashboards that Application Monitoring creates. These dashboards display telemetry and other information, from the perspective of your application.
To learn more, see the following documents:
View and explore telemetry
To view or explore telemetry, use the explorer pages for log, metric, and trace data. These pages provide access to individual log entries, time series, and trace spans, and they help you troubleshoot and analyze the performance of your services and applications.
The explorer pages rely on scopes to determine what resources to query for data. Scopes let you view and analyze data that is stored in multiple projects. If you don't configure observability scopes, then the explorer pages query your project for data. To learn more, see Configure observability scopes.
The explorer pages provide filtering and aggregation capabilities that you can use to control what data appears and how the pages process that data. The explorer pages for logging and trace also perform some analysis for you. For example, the Logs Explorer page displays the rate of errors as a function of time. The Trace Explorer page displays a heatmap that displays aggregated latency data.
Log data
To learn how to use the Logs Explorer page, see View and explore log data.
In the Google Cloud console, go to the Logs Explorer page:
If you use the search bar to find this page, then select the result whose subheading is Logging.
Metric data
To learn how to use the Metrics Explorer page, see Chart metric data.
In the Google Cloud console, go to the leaderboard Metrics explorer page:
If you use the search bar to find this page, then select the result whose subheading is Monitoring.
Trace data
To learn how to use the Trace Explorer page, see Find and explore trace data.
In the Google Cloud console, go to the
Trace explorer page:
You can also find this page by using the search bar.
Analyze telemetry with SQL
To generate insights or identify trends in your data, use the Log Analytics page, which lets you query your data by using the SQL query language.
The Log Analytics page can query the following types of views:
- Log views on log buckets: A log view provides read-access to a subset of log entries that are stored in a log bucket.
- Analytics views: An analytics view contains a SQL query that queries one or more log views, and is itself a resource that can be queried. Use analytics views when you want to transform your log data into a custom format.
By default, query results are shown in tabular form. However, you can display the results in a chart, which can help you identify patterns and trends. The Log Analytics page lets you save and share queries, and it lets you save a query, and the chart or tabular output, to a custom dashboard.
Log data
To learn how query your log data with SQL, see Query and analyze by using Log Analytics.
In the Google Cloud console, go to the manage_search Log Analytics page:
If you use the search bar to find this page, then select the result whose subheading is Logging.
Metric data
Not supported.
Trace data
To learn how query your trace data with SQL, see Query and analyze traces.
In the Google Cloud console, go to the manage_search Log Analytics page:
If you use the search bar to find this page, then select the result whose subheading is Logging.