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Application monitoring in Google Cloud: Bridging manual and AI-assisted troubleshooting

GCP – Application monitoring in Google Cloud: Bridging manual and AI-assisted troubleshooting

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As developers and operators, you know that having access to the right information in the proper context is crucial for effective troubleshooting. This is why organizations invest a lot upfront curating monitoring resources across different business units: so information is easy to find and contextualize when needed.

Today we are reducing the need for this upfront investment with an out-of-the-box Application Monitoring experience for your organization on Google Cloud within Cloud Observability. 

Application Monitoring consists of a set of pre-curated dashboards with relevant metrics and logs mapped to a user-defined application in App Hub. It incorporates best practices pioneered by Google Site Reliability Engineers (SRE) to optimize manual troubleshooting and unlock AI-assisted troubleshooting.

Application Monitoring automatically labels and brings together key telemetry for your application into a centralized experience, making it easy to discover, filter and correlate trends. It also feeds application context into Gemini Cloud Assist Investigations, for AI-assisted troubleshooting.

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1. Application, service and workload dashboards 

No more spending hours configuring application dashboards. 

From the moment you describe your application in App Hub, Application Monitoring starts to automatically build dashboards tailored to your environment. Each dashboard comprises relevant telemetry for your application and is searchable, filterable and ready for deep dives — no configuration required. 

The dashboards offer an overview of charts detailing the SRE Four Golden Signals: traffic, latency, error rate, and saturation. This provides a high-level view of application performance, integrating automatically collected system metrics across various services and workloads such as load balancers, Cloud Run, GKE workloads, MIGs, and databases. From this overview, you can then drill down into services or workloads with performance issues or active alerts to access detailed metrics and logs.

For example in the image below, a user defined an App Hub application called Cymbal BnB app, with multiple services and workloads. The flow below shows the automatically generated experience with golden signals, alerts and relevant logs.

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Figure 1 – A user’s flow from an App Hub defined application (i.e. Cymbal BnB) to the automatic prebuilt Application Monitoring experience in Cloud Observability

2. Labels and context propagation 

See application labels propagated seamlessly across Google Cloud 

Once Application Monitoring is enabled, your application labels are propagated across Google Cloud, so you can see and use them to filter and focus on the most essential signals across the logs, metrics and trace explorers.

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Figure 2 – Logs Explorer showing application automatically tagged with application labels

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Figure 3 – Metrics Explorer showing application labels automatically associated with metrics

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Figure 4 – Trace Explorer showing AppHub label Integration

3. Gemini Cloud Assist Investigations

Troubleshoot issues faster with AI powered Investigations. 

Gemini Cloud Assist’s investigation feature makes it easier to troubleshoot issues because application boundaries and relationships have been propagated into the AI model, grounding it in context about your environment. 

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Figure 5 – Seamless entry point into Gemini Cloud Assist powered Investigations from application logs

Note – Gemini Cloud Assist Investigations is currently in private preview

Try Application Monitoring today

The new Application Monitoring experience provides a low-effort unified view of application and infrastructure performance for your troubleshooting needs.

Take advantage of the new Google Cloud Application Monitoring experience by:

  1. Visiting your Cloud console

  2. Setting up Applications in AppHub

  1. Adding Services and Workloads to your Application

  • Navigating to Application Monitoring in Cloud Observability to see your automatically built experience

  • Enable your Gemini Cloud Assist SKU and sign up for the trusted tester program to get access to the Investigations experience

    • Related docs

    1. Application Monitoring docs

    2. AppHub docs

      1. Apphub coverage docs

    Read More for the details.

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