This course teaches participants techniques for monitoring and improving infrastructure and application performance in Google Cloud. Using a combination of presentations, demos, hands-on labs, and real-world case studies, attendees gain experience with full-stack monitoring, real-time log management and analysis, debugging code in production, tracing application performance bottlenecks, and profiling CPU and memory usage.

What you'll learn

• Explain the purpose and capabilities of Google Cloud’s operations suite.
• Implement monitoring for multiple cloud projects.
• Create alerting policies, uptime checks and alerts.
• Install and manage Ops Agent to collect logs for Compute Engine.
• Explain Cloud Operations for GKE.
• Analyze VPC Flow Logs and firewall rules logs.
• Analyze and export Cloud Audit Logs instances.
• Profile and identify resource-intensive functions in an application.
• Analyze resource utilization cost for monitoring related components within Google Cloud.

Target Audience

• Cloud architects, administrators, and SysOps personnel
• Cloud developers and DevOps personnel

Prerequisites

To get the most out of this course, participants should:

• Have completed the Google Cloud Platform Fundamentals: Core Infrastructure course or have equivalent experience.
• Have basic scripting or coding familiarity.
• Be proficient with command-line tools and Linux operating system environments.

Products

• Cloud Logging
• Cloud Monitoring
• Error Reporting
• Cloud Trace
• Cloud Profiler
• Google Compute Engine Monitoring 
• Google Kubernetes Engine Monitoring
• VPC Flow logs 
• Firewall Rules logs
• Data Access Audit logs

Not covered

This training does not cover:

• SRE concepts
• SRE best practices
• Incident response

Course Modules

Module 1: Introduction to Google Cloud Operations Suite

• Describe the purpose and capabilities of Google Cloud’s operations suite
• Explain the purpose of the Cloud Monitoring tool.
• Explain the purpose of Cloud Logging and Error Reporting tools.
• Explain the purpose of Application Performance Management tools.

Module 2: Monitoring Critical Systems

• Use Cloud Monitoring to view metrics for multiple cloud projects.
• Explain the different types of dashboards and charts that can be built.
• Create an uptime check.
• Explain the cloud operations architecture.
• Explain and demonstrate the purpose of using Monitoring Query Language (MQL) for monitoring.

Module 3: Alerting Policies

• Explain alerting strategies.
• Explain alerting policies.
• Explain error budget.
• Explain why server-level indicators (SLIs), service-level objectives (SLOs), and service-level agreements (SLAs) are important.
• Identify types of alerts and common uses for each.
• Use Cloud Monitoring to manage services.

Module 4: Advanced Logging and Analysis

• Use Log Explorer features.
• Explain the features and benefits of logs-based metrics.
• Define log sinks (inclusion filters) and exclusion filters.
• Explain how BigQuery can be used to analyze logs.
• Export logs to BigQuery for analysis.
• Use log analytics on Google Cloud.

Module 5: Working with Audit Logs

• Explain Cloud Audit Logs.
• List and explain different audit logs.
• Explain the features and functionalities of the different audit logs.
• List the best practices to implement audit logs.

Module 6: Configuring Google Cloud Services for Observability

• Use the Ops Agent with Compute Engine.
• Enable and use Kubernetes Monitoring.
• Explain the benefits of using Google Cloud Managed Service for Prometheus. 
• Explain the usage of PromQL to query Cloud Monitoring metrics.
• Explain the uses of Open Telemetry.
• Explain custom metrics

Module 7: Monitoring Google Cloud Network and Data Access

• Collect and analyze VPC Flow Logs and firewall rules logs.
• Enable and monitor Packet Mirroring.
• Explain the capabilities of the Network Intelligence Center.

Module 8: Investigating Application Performance Issues

• Explain the features and benefits of Error Reporting, Cloud Trace, and Cloud Profiler.
• Explain the functionalities of the Error Reporting, Cloud Trace, and Cloud Profiler.

Module 9: Optimizing the Costs for Operations Suite

• Analyze resource utilization cost for monitoring related components within Google Cloud.
• Implement best practices for controlling the cost of monitoring within Google Cloud.