Documentation forSolarWinds Platform Self-Hosted

Configure Google Cloud Platform for monitoring

To add a Google Cloud Platform (GPC) account for monitoring, you must configure GCP to work with the SolarWinds Platform.

Requirements for the GCP account

  • A private key is generated and the service account has the following privileges to the GCP project.

    • Compute Viewer
    • Monitoring Viewer
    • Service Account Token Creator
    • Service Account User

    This allows the SolarWinds Platform to retrieve status and metrics for the VMs within the project.

  • The appropriate Identity and Access Management (IAM) permissions are configured.

See Create a GCP service account and add IAM permissions for cloud monitoring in SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted.

GCP polling

SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted interacts with the GCP API, using API polling to retrieve status, performance metrics, and other relevant data about monitored resources from the GCP at specified intervals.

By default, API polling fetches metrics and status updates for monitored resources every 5 minutes. You can adjust the polling frequency in the Edit Account workflow.

GCP polling limits

GCP imposes rate limits on its API to prevent overloading its services. These limits vary based on the specific GCP service, such as Compute Engine or Cloud Storage.

The GCP Compute Engine API may have a limit for requests per minute and individual resources may have their own rate-limiting policies based on the API call type. Pricing depends on the GCP pricing policy. See Cloud Monitoring pricing summary for details.

If the rate limit is exceeded, GCP will return an error response indicating the limit has been breached. View Compute Engine API quotas for more information.

Unsupported features

In the current release, the following cloud monitoring features are not supported for Google Cloud Platform.

  • Selecting specific cloud instances or VMs for monitoring
  • Performing actions on cloud instances or VMs, such as stopping, rebooting, deleting, unmanaging, initiating a manual poll, or toggling polling on/off.
  • Managing cloud instances or VMs as nodes in the SolarWinds Platform.
  • Throttling alerts in GCP.
  • Region- and tag-based monitoring.

Create a GCP service account and add IAM permissions for cloud monitoring in SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted

Before you begin, contact an IT admin and have GCP projects within your organization created.

See Create service accounts in Google documentation for more information.

  1. Log in to the Google console using an account with admin privileges.

  2. Go to APIs/services for your project (API & Services > Enable API & Services) and enable the following APIs/services:

    • Cloud Resource Manager API
    • Compute Engine API
    • CloudMonitoring API

    See Enabling an API in Google Cloud documentation.

  3. Create a service account (IAM & Admin > Create Service Accounts). See Create service accounts in Google Cloud documentation.

  4. Grant the account the following roles. See IAM basic and predefined roles reference in Google Cloud documentation.

    • Compute Viewer
    • Monitoring Viewer
    • Service Account Token Creator
    • Service Account User

  5. Generate a private key for the service account. As the key type, select JSON. See Create and delete service account keys in Google Cloud documentation.

    The generated key file contains the GCP credentials needed to add the GCP account to the SolarWinds Platform.

Add a GCP account for monitoring

  1. In the SolarWinds Platform Web Console menu bar, click Settings > All Settings.

  2. Scroll down to Product Specific Settings and click Cloud Infrastructure Monitoring Settings.

  3. In Cloud Infrastructure Monitoring, click Add Cloud Account.

  4. In the Add Cloud Account wizard, click Google Cloud Platform and then click Next.

  5. On Cloud Settings, enter all required details and click Test connection to verify that you can connect to the GCP account. Click Next to continue.

  6. In Cloud Account Display Name, type a name for the account you want to see in the web console.

    • Client Email - provide your email address used to access the GCP console.

    • Private Key - paste the key you generated for the GCP service account.

    • Project ID - enter ID of the GCP project you want to monitor.

    • Optionally, provide your Client Id, Scopes, and Credential Description.

      Consider adding a description to remember which IAM user access key you applied.

  7. On Monitored Regions, review the discovered regions and click Next.

    All discovered regions are monitored, regardless of your selection. Region-specific monitoring will be added in a future version.

  8. On Monitored Resources, review that Monitor all supported resources is selected and click Finish. Your GCP resources will be added for monitoring.

Explore GCP views

  1. In the SolarWinds Platform Web Console menu bar, go to My Dashboards > Cloud > GCP to open the GCP Overview page, with an overview of monitored accounts, entities, and alerts triggered for GCP entities.

  2. Click the Compute tab to see the summary of monitored GCP Compute Instances and VMs.

    • To view a list of monitored VMs with details, such as state, type, or CPU usage, click the Virtual Machines widget.

    • To view more details about a specific VM, click the VM. The VM details page opens.