Note: Use of this Preview offering of Gemini Cloud Assist is subject tothe Google Cloud Agreement, including the Pre-GA Offering Terms of theGoogle Cloud Specific Service Terms,as supplemented by the terms for theGemini for Google Cloud Trusted Tester Program.

Gemini Cloud Assist investigations are a root-cause analysis (RCA) toolfor troubleshooting your infrastructure and applications in complex anddistributed cloud environments. Investigations can help you understand,diagnose, and resolve issues in Google Cloud. With investigations, you canstreamline incident response by reducing the time to resolution and improvingyour overall availability, all with less effort.

Benefits of Gemini Cloud Assist investigations

• Troubleshoot issues in-context.

  Gemini Cloud Assist investigations areintegrated into your current workflows.

• See what Gemini Cloud Assist sees.

  An investigation producesObservations, which are insights about yourenvironment's state that are most relevant to the issue. Observations helpyou to quickly understand what is happening in your environment and arebased on Gemini Cloud Assist's review of data sources such aslogs, configurations, and metrics. Analysis across data sources might comefrom procedural runbooks, broad signal analysis, or tools. Observations arethen ranked and filtered to help you focus on the information that is mostrelevant to your issue. Included in the observations are links to the sourcedata that informs each observation, which lets you further investigate andfact check the observations.

• Diagnose issues.

  Investigations synthesizes the observations and uses domain-specificknowledge to identify probable root causes. Public and private knowledge isused to explain the context around the root cause, making it easier tounderstand. When there is uncertainty, multiple root causes can be providedas hypotheses. You can iterate on the investigation and create new revisionsto drill deeper into certain areas.

• Resolve issues.

  Investigations recommends the next troubleshooting steps or fixes to helpyou resolve the issue. References to specific resources or time periodsgives you relevant information that would have taken longer to gather onyour own, enabling you to get to a resolution faster, with less effort.

• Get additional support.

  If you have asupport package, the Google Cloud console letsyou seamlessly transfer your investigation into a Google Cloud supportcase by using theRequest support button that appears with theinvestigation details. The details of your investigation can then bereviewed by a support engineer so that they have the context from yourtroubleshooting, helping you resolve cases faster, with less back and forth.

Supported Google Cloud products

Supported products are those that investigations support troubleshooting for.Gemini Cloud Assist investigations support the followingGoogle Cloud products:

• App Hub
• Cloud SQL
• Cloud Storage
• Compute Engine
• Google Kubernetes Engine
• Cloud Networking
• Cloud Run
• Dataproc on Compute Engine
• Google Cloud Serverless for Apache Spark
• Pub/Sub
• BigQuery
• Bigtable
• Cloud Composer
• Dataflow
• Spanner
• Memorystore for Redis
• Identity and Access Management
• Cloud Quotas

Not all resources within supported products are, themselves, supported. Sometools, such as the Google Cloud console, prevent you from adding anunsupported resource to an investigation or seeing an investigation buttonassociated with an unsupported resource; however, other tools, such as directREST API requests, can run an investigation even if it includes unsupported,misspelled, or incorrectly formatted resources. A good practice when reviewingthe results of your investigation is to confirm that any resources you specifyin your initial investigation are mentioned in the output observations. If aresource isn't mentioned in the output but seems like it should be, it's likelythat either the resource is unsupported or there is an issue with the namingof the resource.

Entry points

You can initiate an investigation in the following places in theGoogle Cloud console:

• TheInvestigations page

  ClickCreate to initiative an investigation.

• TheLogs Explorer

  TheInvestigate button appears on logs for supported resources when thelog has a severity level of "Warning" or higher. When initiating aninvestigation in the Logs Explorer, the log message, start time, and anyrelevant resources from the log are automatically pre-populate into theinvestigation creation panel. You can optionally edit or add informationbefore running the investigation.

  Go to logs with severity of "Warning" or higher

• Cloud Monitoring alerting

  TheInvestigate button appears for alerts that have a resource label.When initiating an investigation for an alert, a title, issue description,start time, and relevant resources for the alert are automaticallypre-populated into the investigation creation panel. You can optionally editor add information before running the investigation.

• TheGemini Cloud Assist chat panel

  TheNew investigation option appears in the chat panel'sNewdrop-down menu.

• Cloud Hub

  TheCreate investigation button appears in theHealth & troubleshooting page. You can view and initiate investigationsscoped to either a project or application.

• Within specific product pages.

  You can initiate investigations from within supported product pages, suchas workloads in Google Kubernetes Engine that have alerts, Dataproc batchesthat fail, orfailed Airflow tasksin Cloud Composer.

The following options are also available for initiating and viewinginvestigations:

• TheGoogle Cloud mobile app

  Investigations are initiated by going to theObservability tab andselectingInvestigations.

• DirectAPI requests

Considerations

• Each investigation uses anOAuth 2.0 token as partof its normal operation. The investigation creates a token from an existinggrant and, if necessary, requests a new grant that has a scope ofAPI_CLOUD_PLATFORM.

  • The access provided by the OAuth 2.0 token is limited to the accessavailable to the user or service account that runs the investigation.

  • The OAuth 2.0 token is never used for mutating data.

• A Gemini Cloud Assist investigation creates an investigationresource, which includes within it annotations and observations. Thisinformation can be stored in any Google Cloud data center. You shouldn'tperform investigations on data subject to residency or jurisdictionalregulatory compliances. For the support status of other security features, seeCertifications and security for Gemini.

• Gemini Cloud Assist investigations analyze global Google Cloudresources as part of an investigation, such aslogs.

  • Investigations don't analyze location-specific content, such as datastored inregional log buckets.

  • Investigations don't analyze data residing outside of Google Cloud.

• The account that creates an investigation is automatically granted theInvestigation Owner (roles/geminicloudassist.investigationOwner)IAM role for that specific investigation.

• Investigations are designed for targeted troubleshooting withinGoogle Cloud environments. An investigation is limited to diagnosingissues within a single Google Cloud project or singleApp Hub application.

  • For a project-level investigation, the results of the investigation arestored within the project that created the investigation.

  • For an application-level investigation, the investigation is createdwithin theApp Hub management projectof a folder configured for application management, and the results arestored within the management project. The investigation analyzes resourceswithin the selected application, even if they're spread across differentprojects.

  • Gemini Cloud Assist doesn't support applications created in ahost project or a single-project boundary.

• Investigations are subject to thegeneral limitations of AI technology.

• Investigation runs are dynamic, which means re-running the same investigationcan produce results with small differences. Some of the factors thatcontribute to differences between runs include the probabilistic nature ofoutput from large-language models such as Gemini and the fact thatthe overall state of Google Cloud is not static.

• Timestamps are a key piece of information in effective investigations. For thebest results, verify that the start time reported in the investigation isreasonably accurate.

Feedback

User feedback is an important mechanism for improving the quality andperformance of investigations. You can provide feedback in the following ways:

• Configure prompt and response sharingfor Gemini Cloud Assist in your project. By default,Google Cloud does not examine either the inputs or outputs associatedwith your investigations.

• Provide feedback on investigations by clicking on theThumbs Up orThumbs Down icons in any investigation. This records whether you foundthat specific investigation to be helpful. This feedback mechanism onlyrecords the specific feedback that you provide; it does not record any inputsor generated outputs of the investigation.

What's next

• Create an investigation.
• View and manage existing investigations.