This page describes how you can understand the health of your applications andmaintain application availability and reliability.

Default observability features

By default, GKE clusters are configured to do the following:

• Sendsystem logs, audit logs, and application logsto Cloud Logging.
• Sendsystem metricsto Cloud Monitoring.
• UseGoogle Cloud Managed Service for Prometheus tocollect configured third-party and user-defined metrics and then send them toCloud Monitoring. Google Cloud Managed Service for Prometheus lets you monitor and alert onyour workloads using Prometheus, without manually managing and operatingPrometheus at scale.

Customize and enhance data collection

By default, GKE creates a Logging repository forstoring logs for each cluster. You can control which logs and which metrics, ifany, are sent from your GKE cluster to Cloud Logging andCloud Monitoring.

You can also control whether to enableGoogle Cloud Managed Service for Prometheus.

For GKE Autopilot clusters, you cannot disablethe Cloud Monitoring and Cloud Logging integration.

Additional observability metrics

You can collect additional observability metrics by enabling one or moreobservability metrics packages.

• Control plane metrics:Monitor the health of Kubernetes components by collecting metrics for theKubernetes API server, Scheduler, and Controller Manager. These metrics areuseful signals of service health for defining service level objectives (SLOs).
• Kube state metrics:Monitor the health of Kubernetes objects such as Deployments, Nodes, and Pods.
• cAdvisor/Kubelet metrics:Monitor the health of containers and the kubelet.

Third-party and user-defined metrics

To monitor third-party applications running on your clusters such as Postgres,MongoDB, and Redis, usePrometheus exporterswith Google Cloud Managed Service for Prometheus.

You can alsowrite custom exportersto monitor other signals of health and performance.

Use collected data

Use the data you collect to analyze application health, debug, troubleshoot,and test as you develop, deploy, and maintain your applications.

GKE provides built-in observability features to get you startedquickly:

• View collected data for your clusters and workloads on inGKEobservability dashboards.You can customize the provided dashboards for the following purposes:

  • View key cluster metrics, such as CPU utilization, memoryutilization, and the number of open incidents.
  • View clusters by their infrastructure, workloads, or Services.
  • Inspect namespaces, Nodes, workloads, Services, Pods, and containers.
  • For Pods and containers, view metrics as a function of time and view logentries.

  You can alsocreate your own dashboards orimport Grafana dashboardsto meet your needs.

  Note: The provided GKE dashboards only display information forGKE clusters running on Google Cloud. They don't displayinformation for GKE clusters running anywhere else, forexample using on-premises or bare-metal servers.

• View details for your AI/ML workloads in Google Cloud console, includingresources such as JobSets, RayJobs, PyTorchJobs, and Deployments forinference serving.

  Go to the Google Cloud console

• From theObservability tab, you can create recommended alert policies sothat you are notified about issues. To learn more about alerting, see theAlerting overview.

• Create SLOs tomonitor your service performance goals using collected GKEmetrics.

• Use GKE playbooks to troubleshoot common issues such asunschedulable Podsandcontainers that repeatedly crash after restart.

• Explore and analyze your data with tools such asLogs Explorer,Metrics Explorer andError Reporting.

• Review GKEaudit logs that recordadministrative activities and accesses as part ofCloud Audit Logs.Audit log policy determineswhich events are recorded and whether a log entry belongs to an Admin Activitylog or a Data Access log.

Other features

GKE integrates with other Google Cloud services to help youmonitor and manage your clusters and workloads.

• Use thesecurity posture dashboardto identify security concerns based on our standards and industry bestpractices.

• Viewinsights and recommendationsto optimize your clusters.

• Usenetwork policy loggingto help you troubleshoot issues with Kubernetes network policies. If you useGKE Dataplane V2, thennetwork policy logging is built-in.

Pricing

Pricing for integration with Cloud Logging (includingCloud Audit Logs), Cloud Monitoring, and Google Cloud Managed Service for Prometheus isbased on the amount of logs and metrics collected. See thePricing page for details.

Features provided by other Google Cloud services listed inOther features have separate pricing. See the Pricing sectionof those documentation pages for more information.

What's next

• Observe your clusters.Learn how to view dashboards, organize cluster information, and view alertingdetails.

• Enable verbose, OS-level audit loggingon GKE cluster nodes and how to export logs toCloud Logging.

• For more information about how to use observability features to troubleshootGKE, seeConduct historical analysis with Cloud LoggingandPerform proactive monitoring with Cloud Monitoring.