View and customize VM dashboards

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In the Google Cloud console, on the project selector page, select or create a Google Cloud project.

Go to project selector

Verify that billing is enabled for your Google Cloud project.

Enable the Compute Engine and Cloud Monitoring APIs.

Enable the APIs

In the Google Cloud console, on the project selector page, select or create a Google Cloud project.

Go to project selector

Verify that billing is enabled for your Google Cloud project.

Enable the Compute Engine and Cloud Monitoring APIs.

Enable the APIs

Create a VM instance

Create a VM instance if you don't already have one:

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

   Go to VM instances

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

2. Create a VM by clicking Create instance. Configure your instance by using the options in the navigation menu.
3. In the Machine configuration option, do the following:
   1. In the Name field, enter a descriptive name.
   2. In the Machine type preset drop-down, select Shared-core > e2-small.
4. Verify that the OS and storage option displays Debian GNU/Linux. If not, click the OS and storage option and click Change. In the Boot disk dialog, set Version to Debian GNU/Linux.
5. Click Create.

View the VM's observability dashboard

The observability dashboard displays utilization metrics, throughput metrics, and data about logs:

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

   Go to VM instances

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

2. In the VM instances page, click the instance name.

3. Select the Observability tab.

   If you created a VM, then it might take a few minutes before the charts display data.

4. Explore the charts on the Observability tab.

Create a custom observability dashboard

To create an editable copy of the observability dashboard, do the following:

1. In the Observability toolbar, click Save as dashboard.
2. Click Submit.

3. Click View in Monitoring.

   You are now viewing a dashboard which you can customize. This dashboard is managed by Cloud Monitoring.

   To add a widget, click Add widget and complete the dialog. For example, to view your logs with your metric data, click Add widget, select Logs, and then click Apply.

   To remove or modify a widget, use the options in the toolbar of the widget.

   To reposition or resize a widget, use your pointer.

4. If you modified the copy, then click Save.

5. In the navigation pane, select Dashboards.

   In the My Dashboards pane, you see your new dashboard listed.

You have successfully customized the observability dashboard for a Compute Engine VM instance. You can use the same procedure to customize dashboards for many other Google Cloud resources.

View VM dashboards created by Monitoring

Cloud Monitoring creates and manages several dashboards that display metrics for your VM instances. You can access these dashboards from the Dashboards page in Cloud Monitoring:

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

   Go to Dashboards

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

2. To view instance-specific dashboards, in the My Dashboards pane, click VM Instances.

   The VM Instances page lists your VMs and contains links to VM-specific dashboards. These dashboards are created and managed by Cloud Monitoring.

3. To view the metrics for all of your VMs, in the navigation pane, select Dashboards, and then select the GCE VM Instance Monitoring dashboard.

   To create an editable copy of this dashboard, click Copy Dashboard.