This page describes how Storage Intelligence advisor lets you monitor and manage your Cloud Storage environment at scale across organizations, folders, and projects.
Storage Intelligence advisor displays trends and anomalies in your storage patterns, and provides built-in recommendations to optimize usage and resolve performance bottlenecks.
To view Storage Intelligence advisor, see View Storage Intelligence advisor.
Storage Intelligence advisor structure and sections
To help you manage your storage environment, Storage Intelligence advisor displays insights through a structured hierarchy of metrics, findings, and next steps:
- Metrics: data points collected from your Cloud Storage environment, such as storage volume, object counts, and operation rates.
- Findings: anomalies detected from your metrics that require attention, such as a spike in errors or inefficient storage use.
- Next steps: recommendations provided with each finding to help you resolve the identified issue.
To help you analyze your storage data, Storage Intelligence advisor includes the following sections.
At a glance
The At a glance section provides a daily snapshot of your storage environment. The section label adapts to your selected resource: Project at a glance, Folder at a glance, or Organization at a glance. It displays key metrics such as total storage size, bucket and object counts, and average object size. The following table describes how to use these metrics to analyze your storage utilization:
| Metric | Description |
|---|---|
| Total storage size | The total size of your storage across multi-regional and regional storage classes. |
| Total buckets with objects | The number of buckets that contain at least one object. |
| Total objects | The total number of objects in your selected resource scope. |
| Average object size | The mean size of objects in your project, folder, or organization, which indicates storage efficiency. |
Top findings
The Top findings section alerts you to changes in storage behavior that require attention. Depending on the selected resource scope, findings provide aggregated or granular insights:
- Organization and folder scopes: each finding card aggregates anomalies across contained projects and displays the number of affected projects. To view a panel listing all affected projects, click View details. You can then open finding details for any project in a new tab.
- Project scope: finding cards let you drill down into bucket-level and object-level details for that project.
Each finding is associated with one of the following categories to indicate its impact:
Usage optimization: findings that affect storage usage and cost efficiency.
Performance: findings that affect speed, latency, and operational health.
The following table describes the findings that are available in Storage Intelligence advisor:
| Finding | Category | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Spike in Class A or B operations on Coldline or Archive data | Usage optimization | Indicates frequent operations on data in Coldline storage and Archive storage. For example, you might see this finding if monthly reports stored in Archive storage are accessed daily by an analytics job, creating a high rate of operations for data that is better suited for Standard storage. To resolve this finding, move the data to a storage class suited for frequent access, or adjust the analytics job to use cached data. To learn more, see Optimize usage for Coldline and Archive storage data. |
| Spike in 429 errors indicating rate limited requests | Performance | Indicates that Cloud Storage is rate-limiting your requests, which causes latency and timeouts. For example, you might see this finding if a batch processing job rapidly reads or writes many objects in the same bucket, exceeding request limits and causing To learn more, see Improve performance by mitigating rate limited request errors. |
| Spike in cross-region egress | Usage optimization | Indicates an increase in data transfer between Cloud Storage buckets in one region and other Google Cloud services in another region. This activity can lead to unexpected egress costs. For example, you might see this finding if a Compute Engine instance in To learn more, see Manage cross-region egress. |
| Total bytes stored increased above trend over the last 30 days | Usage optimization | Indicates that storage consumption has increased beyond historical trends over the last 30 days. For example, you might see this finding if your bucket retains noncurrent object versions indefinitely after you upload new versions. Indefinite retention can lead to unnecessary storage costs. To resolve this finding, use Object Lifecycle Management to delete noncurrent versions or move them to colder storage, or enable Autoclass to automatically manage storage classes based on access patterns. To learn more, see Identify above trend storage consumption. |
Key charts
The Key charts section contains time-series charts that help you visualize the following storage trends:
- Cumulative object count: tracks the total number of objects in your selected project, folder, or organization across locations and storage classes.
- Storage volume over time: tracks storage size across locations and storage classes.
Use cases
Storage Intelligence advisor supports the following use cases.
Minimize custom reporting
Track metrics across your Cloud Storage environment without maintaining custom data processing pipelines, BigQuery scripts, or external visualization tools.
Centralize oversight
Assess the health of your entire Cloud Storage environment from a single interface across projects, folders, or organizations, without running manual queries across various logs or resources.
To get started, see View Storage Intelligence advisor.
Optimize storage usage
Identify opportunities to optimize storage usage by aligning data with the
appropriate storage class. For example, a Spike in Class A or B operations on
Coldline or Archive data finding indicates that data in Coldline storage or
Archive storage is being accessed frequently. This data might be better suited
for a storage class intended for frequent access, such as Standard storage or
Nearline storage.
To learn more, see Optimize usage for Coldline and Archive storage data.
Resolve performance bottlenecks
Identify performance issues, such as request throttling or unexpected operation
spikes. Findings such as Spike in 429 errors help you optimize I/O
patterns to improve application reliability.
To learn more, see Improve performance by mitigating rate limited request errors.
VPC Service Controls support
Storage Intelligence advisor supports VPC Service Controls, which helps you mitigate data exfiltration risks from your Google Cloud services. When you enable Storage Intelligence advisor within a project inside a service perimeter, VPC Service Controls helps protect the Storage Intelligence advisor API.
VPC Service Controls doesn't support adding folder-level or organization-level resources to service perimeters. Therefore, although you can enable Storage Intelligence advisor at the folder, organization, or project level, VPC Service Controls helps protect only project-level resources. To manage Storage Intelligence advisor at the folder or organization level, use Identity and Access Management (IAM).
What's next
- Key tasks:
- Explore findings:
- Related concepts: