Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is a collection of Google’s computing resources, made available via services to the general public as a public cloud offering.

The GCP resources consist of physical hardware infrastructure — computers, hard disk drives, solid-state drives, and networking — contained within Google’s globally distributed data centers, where any of the components are custom designed using patterns similar to those available in the Open Compute Project.

Google Monitoring(formerly Stackdriver) is a monitoring service that provides IT teams with performance data about applications and virtual machines running on the Google Cloud Platform.

GCP Monitoring Operations performs monitoring, logging, and diagnostics to help businesses ensure optimal performance and availability. The service gathers performance metrics and metadata from multiple cloud accounts and allows IT teams to view that data through custom dashboards, charts, and reports.

GCP Monitoring Operations is natively integrated with Google Cloud Platform and hosted on Google infrastructure. In addition, it can pull performance data from open source systems, such as Cassandra, Apache Web Server, and ElasticSearch.

Monitoring service health in real-time with Zenduty

The cost and impact of system downtime are rising rapidly due to the business’s increasing dependence on data and technology. System downtime can cause loss of opportunities, productivity loss, confidence erosion, potential employee overtime costs to recover work lost and catching up, service level agreement penalties, supply chain ripple effects, and most importantly, a damaged reputation. Effective communication with staff, customers, and service providers are very important to manage the impact of downtime.

Dispatching critical GCP alerts

A key feature of GCP Monitoring is its alerting service which enables you to set up alerts to monitor the metrics and log data for the entire stack across your infrastructure. GCP Operations/Monitoring dispatches these alerts via Email. However, for critical metrics indicative of degraded user experience, email may not be good enough to elicit a prompt response and resolution from your reliability and NOC teams. For high availability services with SLA timeframes in minutes, you need to be able to promptly alert the right engineers and teams about a critical issue, and also gather responders, subject matter experts and communicate to the relevant internal and external stakeholders while at the same time, keeping a watchful eye on the SLAs.

This is where Zenduty can help you.

Integrating GCP Operations/Monitoring alerts with Zenduty

Zenduty acts as a dispatcher for the alerts generated by GCP. Zenduty determines the right engineers to notify based on on-call schedules and escalations and notifies via using email, text messages (SMS), phone calls, Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Android & iOS push notifications.

Zenduty will quickly alert you when your GCP Monitoring alarms are triggered and will include detailed JSON details provided by the GCP Operations Monitoring. This makes it straightforward and easy to diagnose issues directly from Zenduty or your chat platforms like Slack and Microsoft Teams, or on the go with Android/iOS without having to log into multiple services.

Zenduty provides you with everything you need you to minimize your mean time to recovery with advanced routing rules, flexible scheduling, analytics and reporting, integrated ChatOps (with Slack and Teams), stakeholder communications, and SLA alerts.

To get real-time alerts from your Google Cloud resources, head over to the integration documentation here.

Tip: Signup for a free Zenduty trial here and get real-time downtime alerts from GCP. To schedule a demo with our team, click here.

Custom route alerts to the right team or person

There are multiple ways of routing specific GCP alerts to specific teams or individuals, and they can be used in combination.

1. Routing through predefined Escalation Policies — you can create escalation policies that will define whom to notify and who to escalate the alert to if an alert is not acted upon within a specific timeframe(escalation). You can add individuals or on-call schedules/rotations with different users to an escalation policy. You can then map your escalation policy to your GCP service in Zenduty. All GCP alerts will flow through this escalation policy.
2. Using Custom Alert Routing Rules

Routing rules in Zenduty give you unparalleled flexibility when it comes to context-specific routing of alerts. In some situations, alerts can bypass your default escalation policy and go straight to either a specific engineer or to another escalation policy belonging to a specific team.

Collaborating on GCP alerts in Slack and Teams

Zenduty’s Slack and Team’s integrations let you manage your entire incident lifecycle from within your team channels. Zenduty also automatically creates an incident-specific conference bridge(Zoom, Teams, Webex), Jira ticket(two-way integrated) and Statuspage.

Attaching playbooks for better incident preparedness

Most teams have comprehensive playbooks in their Git or Docs or Confluence pages. But they are often hard to find and hard to execute in a transparent manner. Zenduty’s task templates lets you itemize your playbooks into role-specific tasks and automatically adds relevant tasks to your incident. All that your on-call engineer has to do is respond to the alert and look at the tasks tab to get started with triaging the incident.

Signup for a free trial!

If you’re looking for an end-to-end incident management platform, give Zenduty’s 14-day free trial a spin. Resolve your infrastructure issues before they affect your customers, increase reliability and offer industry-leading SLAs. And as always, stay Zen!