How to get logs for Compute Engine API errors? - google-cloud-platform

I am a total beginner in cloud service management, so this is a very basic question.
I have inherited a kubernetes based project running in Google Cloud. I have discovered recently that there are millions of errors I am unaware of in APIs & Services > Compute Engine API > Metrics menu:
I have tried searching for these values both on google in the docs to no avail. With no link to the list of logs and hundreds of sub menu items I feel completely lost on where to start.
How can I get more information about these errors?
How can I navigate to the relevant logs?

Your question is rather general so I will make some assumptions and educated guesses about your project and try to explain.
This level of error with API calls is of course unusually high and suggesting that some things don't work (for example someone deleted a backend service but left the load balancer without any health checks and it's accepting requests from the outside but there's nothing in the backend to process them).
That is just an exmaple - without more details I'm not even speculate further.
If you want to read more about the messages take the second one from the top - documentation for compute.v1.BackendServicesService.delete.
You can also explore other Compute Engine API methods to see what they do to give you more insight what is happening with your project.
This should give you a good starting point to explore the API.
Now - regarding logs. Just navigate to Logs Viewer and select as a resource whatever you want to analyse (all or a single VM, Load Balancer, firewall rule, etc). You can also include (or exclude) certain level of logs (warning, error etc). Pissibilities are endless.
Your query may look something like this:
Here's more documentation on GCP Logs Viewer to help you out.

Related

Need help building an uptime dashboard for a distributed system

I have a product for which I would like to create a dashboard to show
its availability/uptime over time and display any outages.
Specifically I am looking for
ability to report historical information on service uptime
provide details on any service outages
The product is running on a fleet of linux servers and connects to a DB running
on a separate instance, also we have some dedicated instances that run nightly
batch jobs. My system also relies on some external services to provide
additional functionality for select customers. There is redis cache also for
caching data for multiple customers.
We replicate all the above setup (application servers, DB, jobs servers, redis
cache etc) into dedicated clusters for large customers. Small customers are put
on one of the shared clusters to keep costs low.
Currently we are running health checks on application servers only and providing
that information in a simple HTML page. This is a go to page for end-users/customers
and support teams.
Since the product is constructed using multiple systems/services our current HTML
page often times says that the system is up and running fine while can be experiencing
issues with some of its components or external services.
Current health check is using a simple HTTP request and looks for a 200
status code, this check runs every minute and we plot this data into a simple
chart to show last 30 days. We also show a list of outages with timestamp and
additional static information that is manually added.
We would like to build a more robust solution that monitors much more than the HTTP port
and where we have more details like what part
of the system is having issues and how those issues are impacting the system and
which customers are impacted.
Appreciate any guidance or help. We prefer to build the solution using
open source tools since we dont have much budget. Goal is to improve things for
my team members who are already overloaded.
I'm not sure if this will be overkill or not for your setup, given that I don't know your product, but have a look at the ELK Stack and see if you can use some components or at least some ideas from there:
What is the ELK Stack?
The Complete Guide to the ELK Stack

Can i open a website through an Amazon Web Service?

Is it possible to open a website,like facebook.com for example, on an amazon web service?
My objective is to automate a certain task in a game and to do so without having to be online on my computer. The point is to spend less time on that game, but to not be left behind on the progress. (I'm building a bot to automate the daily tasks there, just need to know if i can now leave everything running on amazon)
Another project i want to do is to automate access to my email account and perform certain tasks depending on the emails i receive.
You get the point, i tried searching on google but i only find results about creating or hosting your own website in there and not about accessing existing websites and using automation in them.
It sounds like what you want is a virtual private server - basically a computer in the cloud that you control and is always on.
AWS have a service called LightSail for this kind of purpose. Under the hood lightsail just uses EC2, but lightsail takes away a lot of the options and configuration to provide a simpler 'click and go' kind of service.
Once you have a server you can schedule regular tasks. Depending on the complexity of your needs, you could look at using Cron as a scheduler and curl for you http requests.
For the specifics of any project you have I would suggest opening a new question with details of what you are trying to do, the reading you have done, and examples of any code you have tried.

Is there any way to print to stdout, stderr, or log files in google deployment manager?

I would like to write debug information in my DM templates, but I cannot see nor find a way to generate print statements, logs, or anything to aid in debugging when something goes wrong with my template.
How do I add print or logging to deployment manager?
I checked, currently the only way to troubleshoot is to rely on the expanded template from the Deployment Manager Dashboard. You can check it in the following URL for a given deployment, but I guess you were already aware of this possibility:
https://console.cloud.google.com/dm/deployments/details/DEPLOYMENTNAME?project=PROJECTID
However a feature request has been opened and currently the engineering team is working and discussing the best way to provide to the customers this possibility.
https://issuetracker.google.com/80368273
I advise you to star the feature request in order to get updates via email and to place a comment in order to show the interest of the community.
All the official communication regarding that feature will be posted there.
Disclaimer: I work for Google Cloud Platform Support

What is the best tool to use for real-time web statistics?

I operate a number of content websites that have several million user sessions and need a reliable way to monitor some real-time metrics on particular pieces of content (key metrics being: pageviews/unique pageviews over time, unique users, referrers).
The use case here is for the stats to be visible to authors/staff on the site, as well as to act as source data for real-time content popularity algorithms.
We already use Google Analytics, but this does not update quickly enough (4-24 hours depending on traffic volume). Google Analytics does offer a real-time reporting API, but this is currently in closed beta (I have requested access several times, but no joy yet).
New Relic appears to offer a few analytics products, but they are quite expensive ($149/500k pageviews - we have several times this).
Other answers I found on StackOverflow suggest building your own, but this was 3-5 years ago. Any ideas?
Heard some good things about Woopra and they offer 1.2m page views for the same price as Relic.
https://www.woopra.com/pricing/
If that's too expensive then it's live loading your logs and using an elastic search service to read them to get he data you want but you will need access to your logs whilst they are being written to.
A service like Loggly might suit you which would enable you to "live tail" your logs (view whilst being written) but again there is a cost to that.
Failing that you could do something yourself or get someone on freelancer to knock something up for you enabling logs to be read and displayed in a format you recognise.
https://www.portent.com/blog/analytics/how-to-read-a-web-site-log-file.htm
If the metrics that you need to track are just limited to the ones that you have listed (Page Views, Unique Users, Referrers) you may think of collecting the logs of your web servers and using a log analyzer.
There are several free tools available on the Internet to get real-time statistics out of those logs.
Take a look at www.elastic.co, for example.
Hope this helps!
Google Analytics offers real time data viewing now, if that's what you want?
https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1638635?hl=en
I believe their API is now released as we are now looking at incorporating this!
If you have access to web server logs then you can actually set up Elastic Search as a search engine and along with log parser as Logstash and Kibana as Front end tool for analyzing the data.
For more information: please go through the elastic search link.
Elasticsearch weblink

Identifying ASP.NET web service references

At my day job we have load balanced web servers which talk to load balanced app servers via web services (and lately WCF). At any given time, we have 4-6 different teams that have the ability to add new web sites or services or consume existing services. We probably have about 20-30 different web applications and corresponding services.
Unfortunately, given that we have no centralized control over this due to competing priorities, org structures, project timelines, financial buckets, etc., it is quite a mess. We have a variety of services that are reused, but a bunch that are specific to a front-end.
Ideally we would have better control over this situation, and we are trying to get control over it, but that is taking a while. One thing we would like to do is find out more about what all of the inter-relationships between web sites and the app servers.
I have used Reflector to find dependencies among assemblies, but would like to be able to see the traffic patterns between services.
What are the options for trying to map out web service relationships? For the most part, we are mainly talking about internal services (web to app, app to app, batch to app, etc.). Off the top of my head, I can think of two ways to approach it:
Analyze assemblies for any web references. The drawback here is that not everything is a web reference and I'm not sure how WCF connections are listed. However, this would at least be a start for finding 80% of the connections. Does anyone know of any tools that can do that analysis? Like I said, I've used Reflector for assembly references but can't find anything for web references.
Possibly tap into IIS and passively monitor the traffic coming in and out and somehow figure out what is being called and where from. We are looking at enterprise tools that could help but it would be a while before they are implemented (and cost a lot). But is there anything out there that could help out quickly and cheaply? One tool in particular (AmberPoint) can tap into IIS on the servers and monitor inbound and outbound traffic, adds a little special sauce and begin to build a map of the traffic. Very nice, but costs a bundle.
I know, I know, how the heck did you get into this mess in the first place? Beats me, just trying to help us get control of it and get out of it.
Thanks,
Matt
The easiest way is to look through the logs, but if that doesn't include the referrer than you may also want to monitor what is going out from your web to the app server. You can use tools like Wireshark or Microsoft Network Monitor to see this traffic.
The other "solution" and I use this loosely is to bind a specific web server to app server and then run through a bundle and see what it is hitting on the app server. You could probably do this in a test environment to lesson the effects on the users of the site.
You need a service registry (UDDI??)... If you had a means to catalog these services and their consumers, it would make this job of dependency discovery a lot easier. That is not an easy solution, though. It takes time and documentation to get a catalog in place.
I think the quickest solution would be to query your IIS logs and find source URLs which originate from your own servers. You would at least be able to track down which servers your consumers are coming from.
Also, if you already have some kind of authentication mechanism in place, you could trace who is using a particular service based on login.
You are right about AmberPoint. There are other tools that catalog the service traffic and provide reports showing what is happening to your services. Systinet, SOA Software and Actional also has a products similar to Amberpoint but Amberpoint has a free-ware version, I believe.