Tutorial Series : Application Hub in Google Cloud : Part 3 — Application monitoring
Welcome to Part 3 of the series on Application Hub (App Hub) in Google Cloud.
Part 1 : Introduction
Part 2 : Creating an App Hub application
Part 3 : Application monitoring : this post
In the previous part, we created an App Hub application that had the following services:
In the first part of the series, we had briefly mentioned that one of the advantages of organizing the resources as an Application is that you not only get a logical view of the resources but you now have the ability to immediately zoom into the health of the application and its services. This is made available via Application monitoring that is available in Preview.
Revisiting Logs Explorer
Before we jump into Application monitoring, let’s visit our favorite Logs Explorer to observe a few new things that have got added to the filter fields.
Since we created an Application ( hotel-search-app) and the services inside of it (hotel-search-ui, toolbox and hotel-search-db), they are now available inside of of your Logs Explorer to filter your logs immediately. That’s useful isn’t it?
If you click on a specific Application and/or service, the logs get filtered automatically. The Query expression is also updated accordingly.
Remember that I had mentioned about additional metadata that you could have in your Application and/or Services like Environment, Critically, etc. You can put that to use to filter out the logs too. Just go to the Query Expression field and you will find several variables that are now available to you. A sampling is shown below:
By composing our underlying resources into a higher level App Hub application, we are now able to filter our logs in a much more intuitive and focused manner.
But what about Monitoring? Would there be Dashboards now automatically available too? You guessed it right.
Application monitoring
Let’s get back to our App Hub home page which is listed below:
We click on the hotel-search-app and in the Services and workloads page, we see Application monitoring (overall app) and individual observability links for each of the services that we have in the application.
You can click on any of the View observability dashboard for the services. For e.g. if we click on the one for the toolbox, we get the following:
If you are keen observer, you would have noticed that the dashboard went into Observability Monitoring → Application Monitoring in Google Cloud console (check it out from the left menu that is shown below).
Revisit the Dashboard shown for the toolbox service. It presents any Alerts that are firing for the service, a high level view of the SRE golden signals (Traffic, Latency, etc), a few charts and interestingly, if you keep scrolling to the bottom, you will also see specific Logs filtered for this service also. Something that we saw earlier via Logs explorer, but in this case, it is all integrated and filtered out for you in this single view.
I think this is really impressive and does speed up how you can get to the root of how your specific Application → Service is performing and logs, if any.
We saw this for a single service, but you could go into the root application and view the Monitoring for the overall application too. You get the metrics for all the services in one shot as shown below:
If you select the Dashboard option, you see the overal Golden Signals and are able to filter the details based on various metadata too.
In conclusion
We covered Application monitoring in this part of the series and saw how we are now able to get Application centric views of the logs, dashboards and can zoom/filter quickly into how the overall application or the individual services are performing.
Stay tuned for upcoming parts in this series as we explore App Hub more.
Do let me know if you have any feedback on the series. Thank you in advance.
