Create, query, and manage analytics views

Preview

This product or feature is subject to the "Pre-GA Offerings Terms" in the General Service Terms section of the Service Specific Terms. Pre-GA products and features are available "as is" and might have limited support. For more information, see the launch stage descriptions.

This document describes how to create and manage analytics views. After you create an analytics view, you can query it in a manner similar to querying observability views.

For an overview of analytics views, see About analytics views.

Before you begin

Sign in to your Google Cloud account. If you're new to Google Cloud, create an account to evaluate how our products perform in real-world scenarios. New customers also get $300 in free credits to run, test, and deploy workloads.

In the Google Cloud console, on the project selector page, select or create a Google Cloud project.

Roles required to select or create a project

• Select a project: Selecting a project doesn't require a specific IAM role—you can select any project that you've been granted a role on.
• Create a project: To create a project, you need the Project Creator role (roles/resourcemanager.projectCreator), which contains the resourcemanager.projects.create permission. Learn how to grant roles.

Note: If you don't plan to keep the resources that you create in this procedure, create a project instead of selecting an existing project. After you finish these steps, you can delete the project, removing all resources associated with the project.

Go to project selector

Verify that billing is enabled for your Google Cloud project.

Enable the Observability API.

Roles required to enable APIs

To enable APIs, you need the Service Usage Admin IAM role (roles/serviceusage.serviceUsageAdmin), which contains the serviceusage.services.enable permission. Learn how to grant roles.

Enable the API

In the Google Cloud console, on the project selector page, select or create a Google Cloud project.

Roles required to select or create a project

• Select a project: Selecting a project doesn't require a specific IAM role—you can select any project that you've been granted a role on.
• Create a project: To create a project, you need the Project Creator role (roles/resourcemanager.projectCreator), which contains the resourcemanager.projects.create permission. Learn how to grant roles.

Note: If you don't plan to keep the resources that you create in this procedure, create a project instead of selecting an existing project. After you finish these steps, you can delete the project, removing all resources associated with the project.

Go to project selector

Verify that billing is enabled for your Google Cloud project.

Enable the Observability API.

Roles required to enable APIs

To enable APIs, you need the Service Usage Admin IAM role (roles/serviceusage.serviceUsageAdmin), which contains the serviceusage.services.enable permission. Learn how to grant roles.

Enable the API

1. To get the permissions that you need to create, manage, and use analytics views, ask your administrator to grant you the following IAM roles:

   • Observability View Accessor (roles/observability.viewAccessor) on the observability views that you want to query. This role supports IAM conditions, which let you restrict the grant to a specific view. If you don't attach a condition to the role grant, then the principal can access all observability views. Observability views are in Public Preview.
   • Observability Analytics User (roles/observability.analyticsUser) on your project. This role contains the permissions required to save and run private queries, and to run shared queries.

   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.

2. Make sure that you have an observability view. To learn more, see Cloud Trace storage model.

Create an analytics view

Note: An analytics view can query observability views. When an analytics view queries multiple views, then those views must be in the same location.

To create an analytics view, do the following:

1. In the Google Cloud console, go to the Log Analytics page:

   Go to Log Analytics

   If you use the search bar to find this page, then select the result whose subheading is Logging.

2. Configure the Log Analytics page:
   1. Make sure that the toolbar displays Run query. If the toolbar displays Run in BigQuery, then click Settings and select Log Analytics (default).
   2. If the Views menu isn't shown, then go to the navigation pane and click Views and Schema.

3. Enter and validate the query that you want to save as an analytics view.

   You might want to load and edit the default query for the observability view that your analytics view will query. To load the default query, do the following:

   1. In the Views menu, go to the Traces section, and then select _Trace.Spans._AllSpans.

   2. In the Schema toolbar, click Query, and then click Overwrite.

      The Query pane is updated with a SQL query.

   3. Update the query until you're satisfied with the query results.

4. Create an analytics view:

   1. In the toolbar, click save Save, and then select Save as analytics view.

   2. Enter a name and description for the analytics view.

      The name is limited to 100 characters and can include only letters, digits, underscores, and hyphens.. You can't change the name after you create the analytics view.

   3. Click Save.

   The system creates your analytics view and lists it in the Views pane, in the data_table Analytics Views section.

Query an analytics view

You query an analytics view in a manner analogous to querying observability views. To query analytics views , use the following format for the FROM clause:

FROM `analytics_view.PROJECT_ID.LOCATION.ANALYTICS_VIEW_ID`

The fields in the previous expressions have the following meaning:

• PROJECT_ID: The identifier of the project.
• LOCATION: The location of the analytics view.
• ANALYTICS_VIEW_ID: The ID of the analytics view, which is limited to 100 characters and can include only letters, digits, underscores, and hyphens.

To learn more, see Query and analyze traces.

List analytics views

To list the analytics views in your Google Cloud project, do the following:

1. In the Google Cloud console, go to the Log Analytics page:

   Go to Log Analytics

   If you use the search bar to find this page, then select the result whose subheading is Logging.

2. Configure the Log Analytics page:
   1. Make sure that the toolbar displays Run query. If the toolbar displays Run in BigQuery, then click Settings and select Log Analytics (default).
   2. If the Views menu isn't shown, then go to the navigation pane and click Views and Schema.

3. In the Views menu, go to the data_table Analytics Views section.

Get details about an analytics views

You can use options in the Schema pane to display the following information about an analytics view:

• Name.
• Create date.
• Last update.
• Schema.
• Query.

To view the details for an analytics views, list the analytics views in your project, and then do the following:

1. Select the analytics view whose information you want to view.
2. In the Schema toolbar click View analytics view options, and select View details.

Modify an analytics view

To modify an analytics view, do the following:

1. In the Google Cloud console, go to the Log Analytics page:

   Go to Log Analytics

   If you use the search bar to find this page, then select the result whose subheading is Logging.

2. Configure the Log Analytics page:
   1. Make sure that the toolbar displays Run query. If the toolbar displays Run in BigQuery, then click Settings and select Log Analytics (default).
   2. If the Views menu isn't shown, then go to the navigation pane and click Views and Schema.

3. In the Views menu, go to the data_table Analytics Views section, and select the analytics view that you want to modify.

4. In the Schema toolbar, click View analytics view options, and select Edit view.

   A dialog opens that displays information about the analytics view. You can modify the description and query.

5. After you complete your modifications, click Overwrite saved view.

Delete an analytics view

Note: If you've written queries against an analytics view and delete the analytics view, then those queries will fail.

To delete an analytics view, do the following:

1. In the Google Cloud console, go to the Log Analytics page:

   Go to Log Analytics

   If you use the search bar to find this page, then select the result whose subheading is Logging.

2. Configure the Log Analytics page:
   1. Make sure that the toolbar displays Run query. If the toolbar displays Run in BigQuery, then click Settings and select Log Analytics (default).
   2. If the Views menu isn't shown, then go to the navigation pane and click Views and Schema.

3. In the Views menu, go to the data_table Analytics Views section, and select the analytics view that you want to delete.
4. In the Schema toolbar, click View analytics view options, select Delete view, and complete the dialog.

Limitations

The following limitations apply to analytics views:

• An analytics view can only query observability views.
• The parent resource of an analytics view must be a Google Cloud project.
• You can only query an analytics view by using the Log Analytics page, and only when you use the Log Analytics (default) query engine.
• All views that an analytics view queries must be in the same location.
• You must use the Google Cloud console to create or manage your analytics views.
• You can create at most 100 analytics views per Google Cloud project.
• You can create a most 50 analytics views per region.
• Per Google Cloud project, at most 10 regions can contain an analytics view.

What's next

• Query and analyze traces.
• Chart SQL query results.
• Save and share queries.
• Sample SQL queries.