Configure resource groups

Cloud Monitoring lets you define a set of resources as a group. After you define a group, you can set up alerting policies, charts, and dashboards to monitor the group. You can create up to 500 groups per metrics scope .

About groups

Groups provide a mechanism for alerting on the behavior of a set of resources, rather than on individual resources. For example, you can create an alerting policy that is triggered if some number of resources in the group violates a particular condition (for example, CPU load), rather than having each resource inform you of violations individually.

You define the membership criteria for your groups. A resource belongs to a group if the resource meets the membership criteria of the group. Membership criteria can be based on labels, regions, applications, and other criteria. Resources can belong to multiple groups.

The set of members in a group is dynamic, making groups useful for monitoring changing environments. For example, if you create a group whose membership criteria specifies a geographic region, then new resources in that region are automatically added to the group. You don't have to modify dashboards or alerting policies if the group membership changes.

Groups can contain subgroups, up to eight levels deep. One application for groups and subgroups is management of physical or logical topologies. For example, with groups, you can separate your monitoring of production resources from your monitoring of test or development resources. You can also create subgroups to monitor your production resources by zone.

Using groups

When you create a group, Monitoring creates a dashboard for it. In addition to the standard dashboard controls, group dashboards provide controls to do the following:

• Edit or delete the group. You can't edit or delete a group that is being used by an alerting policy.
• Manage the alerting policies that depend on the group.
• Create and view subgroups.
• View incidents.
• View events.
• View group resources.
• Access group resource dashboards.

Group dashboards are limited to 40 charts. Charts on a group dashboard display data only from the members of the group.

The following screenshot is the default dashboard for the group "My instances":

Overview of your resource groups

In the Google Cloud console, go to the  Groups page:

Go to Groups

If you use the search bar to find this page, then select the result whose subheading is Monitoring.

You can add filters to modify which groups are listed. To add a filter, click Filter table, and make a selection for the filter type. Based on the type you select, make a selection for the filter value or enter the value.

For any group shown on the Groups page, you can do the following:

• View a group's dashboard by clicking on the group's display name.
• Edit the group by clicking edit Edit
• Delete the group by clicking delete Delete
• View the associated alerting policies by clicking Policies notifications
• View the number VM instance and the number of resources in the group

Create a group

To create a group by using the Google Cloud console, do the following:

1. In the Google Cloud console, go to the  Groups page:

   Go to Groups

   If you use the search bar to find this page, then select the result whose subheading is Monitoring.

2. Click Create Group. The following screenshot shows the Create group dialog:

   

3. Replace Name with a display name for the group. The display name isn't required to be unique in the project.

4. Add the group membership criteria. See the next section, Specifying membership criteria, for more information.

5. Click Create.

Specify membership criteria

A group can have multiple membership criteria. The criteria that you see depend on the services that your Google Cloud project is using.

To specify a single criterion when using the Google Cloud console, do the following in the Create group dialog:

1. In the Add criterion dialog, select the Type of criterion from the menu:

   • Name: (Default) Group membership is determined by the display name of the resource.

   • Tag: Group membership is determined by tags. For this option, a secondary menu of resource values that are dependent on your configuration is displayed. For example, if you've created Compute Engine instances and have assigned network tags or labels to the instances, these tags and labels are listed in the secondary menu.

     Tag names should be lowercase.

   • Region: The location of the resource.

   • Resource Type: A resource from which metric data is captured. Resources might include disks, Cloud Storage buckets, or virtual machines (VMs).

   • Security Group: Group membership is determined by Role Based Access Control (RBAC). For example, you can specify a security group when you are creating a Google Kubernetes Engine cluster. For more information, see the Kubernetes reference page Using RBAC Authorization.

   • Cloud Project: Your Google Cloud project identifier.

   • App Engine App: Your App Engine applications.

   • App Engine Service: App Engine services such as the Users API, Memcache, and Images API.

2. If you select the Name or Tag criterion, then an Operator menu is displayed. In this case, select how the comparison is to be performed. By default, the comparison operation is set to Contains.

   For example, if you don't want your group to contain any resources with instance in the name, then set type to Name, value to instance, and the operator to Does not contain.

   When the Operator menu isn't displayed, the comparison operator is Equals.

3. Enter the value to be matched.

4. Click Done.

If you want to add a criterion, then repeat the previous procedure. When you have multiple criteria, you set how the criterion are to be combined with the Combine criteria operator selector. Choose AND if membership requires that a resource satisfy every criterion. Choose OR if membership requires that a resource satisfy a single criterion.

The following screenshot shows the group definition for a group named "My instances":

In this example, there are 2 criterion, both of which must be met.

Delete a group

To delete a group by using the Google Cloud console, do the following:

1. In the Google Cloud console, go to the  Groups page:

   Go to Groups

   If you use the search bar to find this page, then select the result whose subheading is Monitoring.

2. Select the group you want to delete, and then click delete Delete.
3. In the Delete group and subgroup dialog, click Delete to confirm the action to delete the group and its subgroups. If you delete a group, you also remove the group from alerting policies and uptime checks.

You can't delete a group that is being used by an alerting policy. For information about how to identify the alerting policy, see View associated alerting policies.

Edit a group

To edit a group by using the Google Cloud console, do the following:

1. In the Google Cloud console, go to the  Groups page:

   Go to Groups

   If you use the search bar to find this page, then select the result whose subheading is Monitoring.

2. Select the group to edit, and then click edit Edit.

You can't edit a group that is being used by an alerting policy. For information about how to identify the alerting policy, see View associated alerting policies.

View associated alerting policies

To view the alerting policies that depend on a group, do the following:

1. In the Google Cloud console, go to the  Groups page:

   Go to Groups

   If you use the search bar to find this page, then select the result whose subheading is Monitoring.

2. Select the group, and then click notifications Policies.

   The Policies dialog includes the following:

   • Link to each policy.
   • Options to edit, copy, or delete the policy.
   • Toggle to enable or disable the policy.
   • Create Policy button.

Create an alerting policy for the group

To create an alerting policy that restricts the time series selected by the metric to a group, do the following:

1. In the Google Cloud console, go to the  Groups page:

   Go to Groups

   If you use the search bar to find this page, then select the result whose subheading is Monitoring.

2. Select the group, and then click notifications Policies.
3. Click Create Policy.
4. Select the metric type and resource to monitor.
5. Click Filter and select Group.
6. Expand arrow_drop_down Value and select the group name.
7. Click Done.
8. Complete the steps to configure the alerting policy. For more information, see Create metric-based alerting policies.

Manage groups by using the Cloud Monitoring API

You can create, modify, retrieve, and delete groups by using the projects.groups API. However, groups created by using the API are not editable in the UI.

In the API, groups are identified by a groupId field. This is an identifier assigned by Cloud Monitoring when you create the group. The value you provide for the group in the Group Name field is a display-only name, stored in a displayName field.

You can also use Monitoring filters to do the following:

• Add resources to a group.
• List the members of a group.
• Retrieve time-series data based on groups.

What's next

• Create and view uptime checks for the group.
• Create alerting policies for the group.