Preview

This product or feature is subject to the "Pre-GA Offerings Terms" in the General Service Terms section of theService Specific Terms. Pre-GA products and features are available "as is" and might have limited support. For more information, see thelaunch stage descriptions.

This document describes how to get AI-powered assistance from theCloud Assistpanel in the Google Cloud console.

TheCloud Assist panel lets you write natural language statements orquestions (calledprompts) to get in-depth explanations, suggested actions, orguided workflows that help you complete tasks quickly and efficiently withoutneeding to be a cloud expert. While in Preview, there is no cost for using thispanel.

Learnhow and when Gemini for Google Cloud uses your data.

Before you begin

1. In the Google Cloud console, on the project selector page, select or create a Google Cloud project.

   Roles required to select or create a project

   • Select a project: Selecting a project doesn't require a specific IAM role—you can select any project that you've been granted a role on.
   • Create a project: To create a project, you need the Project Creator role (roles/resourcemanager.projectCreator), which contains theresourcemanager.projects.create permission.Learn how to grant roles.
   Note: If you don't plan to keep the resources that you create in this procedure, create a project instead of selecting an existing project. After you finish these steps, you can delete the project, removing all resources associated with the project.

   Go to project selector

2. Verify that Gemini Cloud Assist is set up for yourGoogle Cloud project.

Open and close the Cloud Assist panel

1. In the Google Cloud console, go to any page—for example,theDashboard page.

   Go to Dashboard

2. In the Google Cloud console toolbar, clicksparkOpen or close Gemini Cloud Assist chat.

   TheCloud Assist panel opens. You can click example prompts if they aredisplayed, or you canenter a prompt in theEnter a prompt field.

   To expand theCloud Assist panel to the full width of your browserwindow, clickopen_in_newOpen in full page.

   TheCloud Assist panel opens in a new tab. Your original session remainsopen in the original tab. To close the expanded view, close the tab.

A quick example of entering a prompt in the Cloud Assist panel

As an early-stage technology, Gemini for Google Cloud products can generate output that seems plausible but is factually incorrect. We recommend that you validate all output from Gemini for Google Cloud products before you use it. For more information, seeGemini for Google Cloud and responsible AI.

1. In the Google Cloud console, go to any page—for example,theDashboard page.

   Go to Dashboard

2. In the Google Cloud console toolbar, clicksparkOpen or close Gemini Cloud Assist chat.

3. In theCloud Assist panel, in theEnter a prompt field, enter thefollowing prompt, and then clicksendSend prompt:

   Create a gcloud command to give the developer Google groupaccess to view my Google Cloud project.

   In theCloud Assist panel, a response is displayed.

4. In theEnter a prompt field, send a follow-up prompt:

   Change that to editor access.

   Gemini Cloud Assist uses your conversation history foradditional context when it responds to your prompts. For example,Gemini responds with an updated explanation and command.

5. Optional: If theShow related content link is visible, click the linkto access more information. The link is only displayed when more informationis available.

Chat panel use cases

The following sections detail additionalCloud Assist panel use cases.

Access product knowledge and best practices

Gemini Cloud Assist can access up to date information on Google Cloudproducts and best practices for using them. It can help you compare differentGoogle Cloud products and select the right one. It can also provide advice forconfiguring and using Google Cloud products in an effective, efficient, andcompliant manner. Try some of the following prompts:

• What is Secret Manager?
• What is the difference between Cloud Run and Cloud Functions?
• When should I use a managed instance group?
• What are some best practices for using KMS?
• What storage class should I use for my data?
• Help me choose a regulatory control for my Google Cloud folders.

Limitations: Due to the number of factors that can influence cost and pricing,Gemini Cloud Assist generally doesn't provide service pricing data inchat. For pricing information, visit a service's pricing page directly.

Inspect your cloud resources, applications, and data

Gemini Cloud Assist can access information inside your cloudenvironment. This section shows how to ask Gemini Cloud Assist aboutresource configuration and metrics. It also shows how it can help query data inBigQuery or a Google Cloud database.

Understand resources, policies, and recent changes

Note: This assistance requires enablement of theCloud Asset API and theCloud Asset Viewer IAM role.

To understand resources, policies, and recent changes, try some of the followingprompts:

• What are the names of my instances and their private interface names?
• List the name and network name for the subnetworks.
• How many BigQuery datasets have a label whose value is "inventory"?
• List all config changes in the last 24 hours.
• List all users granted roles/bigquery.admin and include the attached resources.

In addition to providing the information requested, Gemini Cloud Assistprovides you with an equivalent query you can run yourself to verify the results.

Limitations: Because Cloud Asset Inventory requires the presence of an organization, usingGemini Cloud Assist to access Cloud Asset Inventory to understand deployed assetsand their recent changes also requires an organization. Furthermore, when you firstsubmit a prompt that uses the Gemini Cloud Assist,Gemini Cloud Assist can take several minutes to set up a queryenvironment. If your query fails, then wait a few minutes and try again.

Analyze resource performance

Note: This assistance requires enablement of theCloud Monitoring API and theMonitoring Viewer IAM role.

To get a quick analysis of the performance trends of resources such as traffic,throughput, and executions, try some of the following prompts:

• Which of my VMs have the highest utilization?
• What are the top 5 dataflow jobs with the highest estimated backlogprocessing time?
• Total VM network bytes sent per second for each instance?
• What's the QPS on my SQL databases?

Limitations: Due to the number of factors that can influence cost and pricing,Gemini Cloud Assist generally doesn't provide cost data. Forinformation about your cost or bill, visit theFinOps hub.

If you have aStorage Intelligencesubscription and theStorage Insights Viewerrole to accessStorage Insights datasets, then you can sendprompts about your specific buckets and objects, while you're on thecorresponding Google Cloud console storage page. For example, you can send thefollowing prompts:

• How many bytes are stored in my buckets in the us-central1 location?
• What is my Cloud Storage usage, broken down by content type?
• How many objects do I have in Standard storage smaller than 50 GB?

Help with BigQuery datasets

Note: This assistance requires enablement of theBigQuery API as well as theBigQuery Data Viewer andtheBigQuery Job UserIAM roles.

To get help with the configurations of your BigQuery datasets, try thefollowing prompt:How many BigQuery datasets have a label whose value is 'inventory'?

Additionally, when you are on a BigQuery page in the Google Cloud console,you can ask for help with writing a SQL query in theCloud Assist panel. Forexample, if you had a dataset with ride-sharing service data you might enterthe following prompt:Generate a SQL query to show me the direction and subscriber type for the 10 longest trips.

In this example, Gemini Cloud Assist provides a specific SQL query thatyou can review and copy into the BigQuery query editor. You can also askfor help querying your data using Python, for example you could promptGemini Cloud Assist toGenerate Python code to query the bigquery-public-data.ml_datasets.penguins table using BigQuery magics.

Help with databases

To get help with your database deployments, try the following prompts:

• Where are my databases located?
• Show me all databases running on Postgres.
• How many databases do I have in the US?

While you're on a Google Cloud console page for a specific Cloud SQL databaseinstance, you can also ask for database performance information and for helptroubleshooting potential issues. For example,What is thecurrent CPU utilization of this database?.

Design and deploy Google Cloud applications

This section details a few examples to help design and deploy your Google Cloudapplications.

Ask for help creating resources

You can ask Gemini Cloud Assist for help creating resources or policiesusing either Google Cloud CLI commands or Terraform, andGemini Cloud Assist will reply with a snippet of code that you can copyinto your shell or IaC repository. For example:

• How do I use Google Cloud CLI to execute a Cloud Run job and set thetimeout to 20 minutes?
• I want to grant the user "user@company.com" the "Security Administrator" rolefor the "prod-subnet" subnet for project "xyz-123". What Google Cloud CLIcommand can I use?
• Give me a Terraform configuration to create an Enterprise Plus Postgresqldatabase instance with data caching.
• Create a custom organization policy that requires all new VM instances tohave the n2d machine type.

Additionally, when you ask Gemini Cloud Assist to create anorganization policy, theresponse includes the option totest the policy directlywithin the Gemini Cloud Assist chat.

Create a new application

You can ask Gemini Cloud Assist for help creating an application. Forexample:Help me create a three tier web application for a new CMS system.

In addition to providing some suggestions for getting started and a proposedarchitecture, Gemini Cloud Assist will provide a link to start buildinghe application in the Application Design Center. This lets you transfer thecontext of this prompt and response directly to Google Cloud visual applicationdesign experience.

Additionally, Gemini Cloud Assist paid tier users are able touse natural language in theCloud Assist panel with the Application Design Centerto iteratively update their application architecture.

Investigate and troubleshoot issues

You can use theCloud Assist panel to get help fromGemini Cloud Assist with initial steps investigating andtroubleshooting issues with your applications.

Check for Google Cloud incidents impacting your project

Note: This assistance requires enablement of theService Health API and theService Health Viewer IAM role.

To check for Google Cloud incidents impacting your project, try some of thefollowing prompts:

• Is there something going on with Google Cloud? I'm seeing issues with my project.
• What's the latest update on the Compute Engine outage in us-central1?
• How is my project impacted by the Cloud Storage incident?
• Is there a workaround for the BigQuery incident?

Investigate database issues

To help understanding potential database, including performance, health, andcompliance, try some of the following prompts:

• What is the current CPU utilization of this database?
• Which of my queries have high latency for this database instance?
• What is the slowest query for this database in this instance?
• How many error log entries are there for this database instance?
• What issues are affecting my databases?
• What databases have NIST issues in Europe?

Optimize Google Cloud resources

You can use theCloud Assist panel to get information that helps you tooptimize costs, and recommendations that help you to optimize your resourceusage.

Get recommendations

Note: This assistance requires enablement of theRecommender API and theRecommender Viewer IAM role.

To help optimize your Google Cloud resources and get specificrecommendations for estimated savings and cluster reliability, try the followingprompts:

• Give me recommendations to reduce my resource costs.
• What are all the quotas for my project that are almost hitting the limit?
• What BigQuery datasets should I partition or cluster?
• Which of my VMs are idle?

Get cost and resource utilization data

Note: This assistance requires enablement of theApp Optimize API and theReader orViewer IAM role, or a custom role with thebilling.resourceCosts.get permission.

You can get summary data about resource costs to help you optimize yourresource usage and costs.

Cost totals in Gemini Cloud Assist responses are based on yourcontract prices, before anycommitted-use discounts (CUDs) orother credits are applied. For an application, the total cost includes allresources that are fully used by the application and doesn't include costs forresources that are shared across applications.

Try the following prompts:

• Show me the top 5 resources that cost me the most last month.
• How much did my GKE cluster my-cluster-id cost me last week?
• What are my most expensive resources in us-central1?
• What were the least cost efficient resources last month for my app web-store?

For more information about this assistance, seeOptimize costs with Gemini assistance.

For additional information about your costs or bill, visit theFinOps hub.

Conversation history

Gemini Cloud Assist keeps a history of your conversations foryou to view later. Conversations older than 180 days are automatically deletedfrom chat history storage. Alternatively, you can manually delete specificconversations.

Note: Users with thecloudaicompanion.topics.getIAM permission for a project have access through the API tohistory created by users within the project, even though this access is notsurfaced in the Google Cloud console. This permission is found in roles suchas theOwner role, and can be included incustom roles as well.

View or delete a conversation in the history

1. In theCloud Assist panel, clickmore_vertMore actions, and thenclickShow chat history.

   TheRecent chats panel opens, displaying any saved conversations.

2. To view a conversation, click the conversation.

3. Optional: To manage a single conversation, next to theconversation title, clickmore_vertMore actions, and then doone of the following:

   • To delete the conversation, clickDelete chat.
   • To rename the conversation, clickRename chat.

Clear your chat session

To clear the chat session history, in theCloud Assist panel, clickmore_vertMore actions, and then clickNew chat.

Limitations

If youset up Gemini Cloud Assist for a folderand are using theCloud Assist panel at the folder level in theGoogle Cloud console, then assistance and responses are limited toapplications related to the folder for products that support applications. Thefollowing list includes Google Cloud products supported at the folder level:

• Application Design Center
• App Hub
• Cloud Asset Inventory
• Cloud Hub
• Cloud Monitoring
• Logs Explorer

To get assistance on other products and resources, use project picker at the topof the Google Cloud console page to select a project resource.

Additionally, you must enableapplication management on thefolder to use theCloud Assist panel at the folder level.

What's next

• For more examples and suggestions to help you create your own prompts, seeWrite better prompts for Gemini for Google Cloud.
• To discover other ways to get Gemini assistance, seeGemini for Google Cloud overview.