Metrics and dashboards in GCP - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Create a Custom Metrics Dashboard in GCP

📖 Scenario: You are a cloud engineer at a company using Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Your team wants to monitor the CPU usage of virtual machines to ensure they run smoothly without overload.You will create a custom metric and then build a dashboard to visualize this metric.

🎯 Goal: Build a custom metric in GCP to track CPU usage and create a dashboard that displays this metric clearly.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a custom metric descriptor for CPU usage

Set a threshold value for CPU usage alert

Write a query to fetch CPU usage data

Configure a dashboard widget to display the CPU usage metric

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Monitoring VM CPU usage helps prevent performance issues and downtime by alerting teams before problems occur.

💼 Career

Cloud engineers and DevOps professionals often create custom metrics and dashboards to maintain healthy cloud infrastructure.

1

Create a custom metric descriptor

Create a custom metric descriptor named custom.googleapis.com/vm_cpu_usage with a description CPU usage percentage of VM instances and a metric type of GAUGE.

GCP

# Define the custom metric descriptor for CPU usage
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use the exact metric name custom.googleapis.com/vm_cpu_usage and set the type to GAUGE.

2

Set a CPU usage alert threshold

Create a variable named cpu_alert_threshold and set it to 80 to represent 80% CPU usage as the alert threshold.

GCP

metric_descriptor = {
    "type": "custom.googleapis.com/vm_cpu_usage",
    "description": "CPU usage percentage of VM instances",
    "metric_kind": "GAUGE",
    "value_type": "DOUBLE"
}
# Set the CPU usage alert threshold
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Set cpu_alert_threshold exactly to 80.

3

Write a query to fetch CPU usage data

Write a variable named cpu_usage_query that contains the Monitoring Query Language (MQL) query string to fetch the custom.googleapis.com/vm_cpu_usage metric data for the last 5 minutes.

GCP

metric_descriptor = {
    "type": "custom.googleapis.com/vm_cpu_usage",
    "description": "CPU usage percentage of VM instances",
    "metric_kind": "GAUGE",
    "value_type": "DOUBLE"
}
cpu_alert_threshold = 80
# Write the MQL query to fetch CPU usage data for last 5 minutes
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use the exact query string 'fetch custom.googleapis.com/vm_cpu_usage | within 5m'.

4

Configure a dashboard widget for CPU usage

Create a dictionary named dashboard_widget with keys title set to "CPU Usage", type set to "line_chart", and query set to the variable cpu_usage_query.

GCP

metric_descriptor = {
    "type": "custom.googleapis.com/vm_cpu_usage",
    "description": "CPU usage percentage of VM instances",
    "metric_kind": "GAUGE",
    "value_type": "DOUBLE"
}
cpu_alert_threshold = 80
cpu_usage_query = 'fetch custom.googleapis.com/vm_cpu_usage | within 5m'
# Create the dashboard widget dictionary
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use the exact keys and values as specified, and assign cpu_usage_query to the query key.