Cloud Assist Investigations

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

If you are interested in using this Private Preview feature, join the Gemini Cloud Assist Trusted Tester Program.

Benefits of Gemini Cloud Assist Investigations

  • Troubleshoot issues in-context.

    Gemini Cloud Assist Investigations is integrated into your current workflows. This includes the following places:

    • Logs Explorer: You can trigger investigations from log messages.
    • In-product errors: You can trigger investigations from within product pages such as Google Kubernetes Engine or Dataproc.
    • Cloud Hub: You can trigger investigations from the Health & troubleshooting page in Cloud Hub.
    • Chat: You can interact with and ask questions about your investigation in chat.
    • Investigations page: You can trigger investigations from the main Investigations page by clicking the Create button.

  • Understand issues.

    An issue is information that you provide Investigations, which can include errors, a description, a timeline, or the affected resources. Observations are insights about your environment's state that are most relevant to the issue. Observations help you to quickly understand what is happening in your environment. Investigations use the context of your Google Cloud environment to analyze data sources such as logs, configurations, and metrics. Analysis across data sources might come from procedural runbooks, broad signal analysis, or tools. Observations are then ranked and filtered to help you focus on the information that is most relevant to your issue.

  • Diagnose issues.

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

  • Resolve issues.

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

  • Get additional support.

    If you need additional support, your investigation can be seamlessly transferred into a Google Cloud support case. The details of your investigation can be used by a support engineer so that they have the context from your troubleshooting, helping you resolve cases faster, with less back and forth.

Example of using Investigations

Suppose you see an error log within the Logs Explorer. If you have enabled Investigations, you can start an investigation on the error by clicking the Investigations button associated with the log.

Screenshot of an error log.

  • When you click the Investigate button, a panel opens with an investigation creation form. Details of the error pre-populate form, such as the time, message contents, and resources of the log.

    You can add more information or modify the existing details before clicking Create to begin the investigation.

  • Investigations first discovers resources that could be connected to your issue.

    Investigations analyzes data sources such as logs, events, and configurations that are produced by these resources.

  • Investigations then produces a series of relevant observations based on this analysis, in order to build an understanding of the issue.

    Screenshot of Investigations observations.

    Included in the observations are links to the source data that informs each observation, which lets you further investigate and fact check the observations.

  • Investigations also produces one or more hypotheses as to the cause of the error.

    Screenshot of Investigations hypotheses.

    Hypotheses take into account all the observations and use the observations in the justification for each hypothesized cause. Each hypothesis contains additional information about the rationale for the hypothesis, and each hypothesis suggests either next steps for investigating the cause of the error or recommended fixes to resolve the issue, letting you troubleshoot the issue to its resolution.

Supported Google Cloud products

Supported products are those that Investigations support troubleshooting for. Gemini Cloud Assist Investigations support the following Google Cloud products:

What's next