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Google has announced Stackdriver Workspaces, a tool that enterprises can use to monitor workloads and computing resources across Google Cloud Platform (GCP), on-premises and Amazon Web Services (AWS) environments.
With it, organizations can better organize and manage data from all of the tools used to monitor workloads in the cloud, such as Stackdriver Kubernetes Monitoring, Stackdriver APM and OpenCensus. The goal is to enable visibility into workloads regardless of whether it is running on GCP, a hybrid environment or elsewhere.
“Workspaces can track your existing GCP projects, which form the basis for managing permissions and resources within GCP,” said Mary Koes, product manager, and Charles Baer, a solutions architect at Google, in a blog Sept 12. It can also be used to track any AWS accounts that an organization might want to monitor, the two Google managers said.
As one example, they pointed to a situation in which a business has an application with components split across different projects in GCP and AWS accounts. In such a situation, Stackdriver Workspaces will allow them to monitor all of the application’s resources across the two environments via a single pane of glass.
A Workspace contains dashboards, alerting policies, uptime checks and group definitions that members accessing it can use to monitor projects running on Google cloud and AWS. Enterprises can organize access to Stackdriver Workspaces in a variety of ways. The most common are by team function, by organization and by environment, Koes and Baer said.
When access is organized by team function, members of separate teams, like operations and testing, have their own Workspace to monitor environments relevant to their roles.
When access is provisioned by organization, administrators can use a single Workspace to monitor all projects within that organization. One use case for enabling access by organization is to support centralized logging and monitoring of cloud resources. “This approach provides a single Workspace to aggregate, filter and alert on all the monitoring metrics,” Koes and Baer wrote.
Organizing Workspaces by environment allows different functions such as development and production to have separate Workspaces relevant to their specific roles in a project.
A Stackdriver Groups functionality gives enterprises a way to group and to monitor a set of similar resources such as virtual machine instances, load balancers and databases. Administrators can also group resources based on their own custom criteria. For instance, they can group and monitor resources by name, applications, region, tags and other criteria. Stackdriver supports the creation of and monitoring of a subgroup such as a single microservice.
To help organizations better understand Stackdriver Workspaces and how to get started on it, Google is offering a free online tutorial that will be available through the end of September. Over the next several months, Google will also be adding new functionality and training features to help enterprises use Workspaces, Koes and Baer said.