GCP – What’s new with Active Assist: New Hub UI and four new recommendations

The Active Assist portfolio of intelligent tools can help you reduce costs, increase performance, improve security, and even help you make more sustainable decisions. Today, we’re excited to announce some new Active Assist features that address some of our customers’ largest concerns. These features unlock some key functionality that help you better understand and use recommendations, all aimed to help make managing and optimizing your cloud simpler and easier. 

Revamped Recommendation Hub

Recommendation Hub is a centralized page on Google Cloud that helps you view all of your recommendations in one place across multiple categories: cost, security, performance, reliability, manageability, and even sustainability. We recently made improvements to help you better understand the recommendations you have and to help you focus on the ones that are the most impactful: 

1. Organization-view of recommendations
One of our most in-demand features: you can now view all recommendations across all of your projects in your organization in one UI! Simply change the picker at the top left of the screen to choose an organization, and Active Assist shows all the recommendations under your organization (as long as you have the correct IAM permissions).

2. Pre-filtered recommendations by value category
You can now view all of your recommendations under one category in a simple  table view, so you can prioritize and focus on the recommendations that are the most relevant and important to you.

3. Custom sorting and filtering
With our new table views, you can sort and filter by different fields, such as product category, recommendation, cost savings, priority, etc. so you can find and view recommendations more easily.

Four new recommendations

We’re continually adding new recommendations to the Active Assist portfolio based on customer feedback, to help you manage risk and optimize operations. 

1. Cloud deprecation and breaking change recommendations
At Google Cloud we take pains to provide backwards compatibility for our services. However, from time to time, we need to evolve the platform in a way that could impact some users e.g., for security purposes. In addition to following a stringent process to minimize customer impact, Active Assist now includes recommendations about potential breaking changes, providing an additional mechanism for customers to learn about them.

Our new cloud deprecation and breaking changes recommender helps identify Cloud resources that will be affected by upcoming deprecations and breaking changes while providing guidelines on how to manage them. Like our other recommendations, you can view them through our Recommendation Hub UI, API, and BigQuery export. 

Deprecation and breaking change recommendations are offered at no charge and are available for all users today. Making sure you get ahead of these changes is important to help prevent any disruptions to your environment and ensure you are on the most reliable and supported services. 

2. IAM for BigQuery recommendations
We’ve expanded the popular IAM Recommender to include IAM recommendations on BigQuery datasets. If your principals have roles on BigQuery datasets but they are not using all of the permissions within that role, you can now receive recommendations to remove or replace any of those roles. These recommendations help you enforce the principle of least privilege by ensuring that principals have only the permissions that they actually need. 

You can view your recommendations through UI, API, or BigQuery export. The recommendations are currently free but will require Security Command Center Premium after April 29th. 

3. Advisory Notifications recommendations
Advisory Notifications provides IAM policy recommendations to ensure the right parties within your organization have access to view critical security and privacy notifications in the Google Cloud console, so that they can receive and quickly address security notifications. 

4. Recent change recommendations
We want to help you detect and mitigate issues (e.g., service outages) caused by misconfigurations to your important cloud resources. The new recent change recommendations automatically flags recent risky changes to cloud resources that are identified as important based on their usage and other signals. For example, if you deleted a highly used project, recent change recommendations will proactively warn you about the risks associated with the change, helping to identify — and prevent — unintended issues.. 

We’re excited about these latest change risk recommendations, and hope they will help you both prevent and mitigate misconfigurations and risky changes to your infrastructure. Try out the new features on Recommendation Hub yourself. If you have any feedback, please feel free to reach out to active-assist-feedback@google.com.