Introducing gCloud Genie! gCloud Genie demystifies Monitoring!

Recommended: Please read the Introduction here: Tech blogs with a twist!

“AAARRRGHHH!!!” “What did I get myself into!”

Zach Kennedy, the Rockstar, the hotshot Enterprise Architect, the newest celebrity hire in the Cygnos Imperial Bank, banged his fist on his desk within the closed confines of his corner office.

In a superhuman achievement, within a year of his hire, through a blend of persuasion and enforcement, and some smart positioning with the powers that be, he had managed to question the status quo and gradually changed mindsets. He had successfully gotten the bank from a largely traditional IT Enterprise to look at the cloud to power the next phase of their growth. Things had come to a point where the management was ready to take a plunge into the world of Cloud Computing! He had just returned from a meeting presided by the CEO, CFO, CISO & the CIO.

He had originally expected it to be a final discussion prior to selection of a Cloud Service Provider, but unfortunately, it turned into a bloodbath!

“I need the new app platform roll-out, like Now! Now, Now, Now!” went the CEO.

The CIO said, “Sure; sign the paperwork & we’ll get started right away!”

“I ain’t signing a damn thing until you prove a superior ROI”, thundered the CFO.

“Oh no you don’t! Nothing goes outside the Datacenter unless your team satisfies my folks that our customers’ data is secure!” The CISO chimed in.

They had almost come to blows and the meeting ended in an impasse!

Poor Zach, he was so close yet so far from realizing his dream of transforming CIB!

He took a few deep breaths, calmed down and put on some music. He needed answers and he needed them fast!

There was only one person he trusted in the whole world, to help him here!

gCloud Genie! His savior through some tough times!

He pulled out a very special, very precious pen drive and plugged it into his Laptop. With a puff of smoke, the Genie appeared on screen!

“How may I help you, master?”

Wearily, Zach narrated the whole incident to the Genie.

“Don’t worry master, I’ll help you. We’ll get there!”

There was total confidence in his voice.

It had been 6 months since the disastrous meeting that still gave Zach goosebumps, but in those six months, with the help of gCloud Genie, Zach had successfully navigated the labyrinth that was CIB, and gotten Google Cloud Platform (GCP) selected as the strategic partner of choice. They had even rolled out their first workload in production, with a large pipeline of future roll-outs.

Zach considered them to be baby steps, but he was happy that CIB had started walking the path of Cloud Transformation!

Zach was reminiscing about all the hard work that had gone in, smiling to himself in quiet satisfaction, when suddenly, Aaron Baker, the lead for Cloud Operations, Cygnos Imperial Bank, burst into his corner office one morning.

“Dude, you gotta help me out here!”

Aaron was responsible to keep the Cloud running smoothly and all the application owners happy.

“What’s up Aaron? What’s the matter? You’re looking all flushed!”

“Well, I just got off a nasty call with a bunch of App Teams. They all want to take their workloads to cloud. Some are in Dev, some are in UAT, we got the one CRM workload in production, and so on.”

“Well, that’s great!” Zach said.

“Well, yes, in a way, but that’s not the point! There are a ton of workloads coming up. Each is deployed in a GCP project of it’s own, for user and role segregation”

“Correct, that’s the way it should be” said Zach.

“Yes, but because of this, it’s difficult for me to see their resource utilization and other metrics from a central location!” Aaron fumed. “On today’s call, there were multiple teams, some reporting performance issues, some reporting underutilization, it got crazy out there, and I was unable to help them!”

“I don’t want to get rights into each App-owners respective project, that’d be a violation of the least privilege principle! More importantly, as a lead for Cloud Ops, I do need a single pane visibility into how each workload is behaving!” Aaron concluded.

Zach now understood the problem. “That’s it? I’ll get on it right away!”

Hidden on Zach’s Laptop in a minimized window, gCloud Genie was listening to the banter and smiling!

As soon as Aaron left, Zach asked Genie.

“It’s a non-issue man, it’s very simple”, Genie asserted. “Here, I’ll show you. The tool of choice for this problem is ‘Cloud Monitoring’. There’s a way to create what is called a ‘Scoping Project’ or a project just to handle centralized monitoring, and configure Cloud Monitoring to pass on all the metrics to it, for central viewership. The metrics are also normally visible in their respective projects. This way, the application teams get their own application-specific view, and Aaron gets his Enterprise-Wide view. Both are happy!”

For the umpteenth time Zach felt a rush of gratitude towards his digital helper. The journey so far would have been impossible without gCloud Genie!

“That’s terrific G!” Zach exclaimed! “Can you walk me through it?”

“Absolutely! Lemme just show you…”

“Here, this is a listing of all the projects that CNB is currently running”

“Notice, I’ve created a new separate project called ‘CNB-SharedMonitoring’ purely for this purpose.”

“Right”, said Zach

“Now what you do is, go into the Shared Monitoring Project and fire up Cloud Monitoring from the Hamburger Menu.

By default, you see the Metrics Scope as only one project — that project. You click on ‘Metrics Scope’ and a pane opens up, which shows only that project.

Click on ‘Add Cloud Projects to Metrics Scope’ button.”

“I can anticipate that something seriously awesome is going to follow this” Zach exclaimed rubbing his hands!

“Right you are, my friend! Here! you can see I’ve selected other projects from CNB into this project for monitoring. These are called Monitored Projects. I shall proceed to add them now.”

“There! All GCP projects have been added into the Monitoring pane. By the way you can even add AWS Account for centralized Multi-Cloud Monitoring!”

“There you go! This is exactly what Aaron wanted, didn’t he! Here you can see all assets across all projects truly in a single pane of glass. Notice that the statistics are visible for VMs from the Landing Zone (cnb-lz) and the GKE Nodes from the CRM Project (cnb-crm) all in the same graph and the same dashboard!”

“Oh! And last but not the least, if the individual Application owners go into Cloud Monitoring in their respective projects, they can see that ‘Big Daddy’ Aaron is watching!

That’s it! Job done! If Aaron wants to read up more on this, look up best practices, user permissions required etc., please pass on this reading material to him.

“This is beyond brilliant, thank you so much G” Zach exclaimed!

The gCloud Genie smiled and folded his hands in a gracious “Happy to help!”