Managing Your Resources

4. GCP Billing

Welcome back. Let's talk about billing so briefly, just a couple things to just make sure you're aware of, make sure you understand. And the next module will be a short demo that'll walk you through some of the areas as well here.So with billing, it's important to understand that you know that the billing is going to be linked to your project IDs. So if you use a resource in this project ID,and again, it's tied to this project name, this projectID, then the billing would go towards that. And then if you had an organisation set up, that organisation would be hierarchical, essentially. And I know I said that all wrong,but then there's a hierarchy essentially to that. Now in this case, you could have many different projects that are built, but still your billing account essentially would be your Gmail account that you're using essentially without having an organisation set up. So you can see I'm using the free credit. I've got 228 left and credits left, 314 days left. You'd also set up alerts. Again, if you want to restrict usage, make sure that you keep a notification going. If you reach certain thresholds, you can create what's called an alert. The alert will send a trigger. So again, create an alert. It sends a trigger. And then if you're going to export your billing information, you can do that.

Now, you could do a big query exporter. You could do a file export. So again, I'm going to say this twice. You could do a BigQuery export or a file export. To do a big query export, though, you've got to set up BigQuery and use BigQuery as an additional cost. Again, if you're an enterprise, you really want to analyse your spending and keep track of who's doing what, when, and how. This is a great way to do it. Or you could just do a file export. So the file export is essentially going to allow you to download a CSV file. So, nothing major there. Now, with billing, just a couple of notes. With this, again, remember, it's file or BigQuery. You could also create a GCsbucket or BigQuery data set. When you enable billing, it's up to you. You could also set access based on identity management. Now remember, file export is CSV,but you'd also use JSON. Just a note, you can't use both.

Just remember that. And the rest of the stuff is nice to know, but nothing that you can really see per se on the test. Another note, though, is that the report is generated daily. So you can't just go in and create a new report. So at certain times of the day, I don't know. I think a lot of the billing depends on what region you're in and when it's generated. So I don't know if I have a good answer for that. I didn't find a good answer, but I'm guessing it probably just depends on the region and zone you're in, and that the billing is done at specific times of the day. So with that said, that's all that I had on billing. I'm going to do a short demo just to show you. But the thing I really want you to know is that you can export billing to a file. So the file is going to be what it'll be, CSVor JSON, not both or to a BigQuery data set. So those are really the two important factors I want you to know for the test on billing. So let's do the quick demo and then we'll move on to you.

5. Demo - GCP Billing

Okay, folks, welcome back. I just wanted to do a little demo on billing in GCP. So I'm over on the console at billing. Now, to get there, you can go several different ways. The easiest way to get the bill is to go to billing, and there you are. Now I'm using a free credit. So, again, not much there. But in a corporate enterprise, again, you'll, of course, see bigger numbers. Now you can go over here too. And I want to cover two things that I saw in the beta exam that I think you might want to know. Now, I didn't see any billing questions in the released version of the exam,but there are likely two different pools. So I don't know per se if the other pool has a billing question or not, but I want to cover sort of the speed and feed thing that you want to know in case you do get that question. Now, you could set up budgets and alerts. However, what will happen is that if you set up a budget, I already set up one already.It's very simple. You go ahead and create a budget.

You go ahead and call it whatever you want. I'll just say GCP class number two, my billing amount. I can then specify a specific amount. You know, it could be whatever it is in dollars, basically limited to what was spent last month. So again, I could put in $120, let's say,and it'll go ahead and break up the alert. So basically, it will send you an email and also let you know that you're 50% of the budget. And then when you hit 90%, I'll send you an email 100.Now you can change these to whatever you want. Personally, I would set it to 75%, just because 90% is pretty much what you're like driving on the highway. You just passed the last exit for 30 miles, and you have exactly a gallon of gas left. And so, setting it to 75 or 80 would be recommended just to be safe. Anyway, it's just for the test. Do you know that? You create a budget and you go ahead and save, and you can see that it is there. Now, you could also go over here to Transactions. It'll let you know what transactions were made, what was paid, what was used, so you'll see that there was again a free credit, and it gives you the breakdown, compute engines, cloud, SQL, etc.

Billing Expert Now This is the other question I saw. You may recall from the lecture that you could do two things on the bill: export to BigQuery or export to a file export. Now you'll see that I select a project and then it'll automatically pop up saying that I have to go to BigQuery,so I have to actually create a data set for billing. So again, there's an additional cost for that. Just be aware of that. And then again, once you create that, you want to select that data set and that will autopopulate, so you don't have to worry about that. Or you can go over here to file an export. You go ahead and export it to a bucket and then put in whatever prefix you want. I could select CSV or JSON, and then again, I could go ahead and put in whatever the bucket name is, and I don't remember the bucket name. But again, it doesn't matter. It's very easy to do that. So again, if you find the bucket name, now you have to go back to storage and then select Object storage. And then you want to go over here to select that. So again, BigQuery is over here. You want to go up here to storage.

And let me see, I've got my buckets here. Which one do I want to use? Let's see. I could use any one of these. I think I Todd labelled these GCP classes. And I'm going to select that one. I'm going to copy that. Then I'm going to go back to tolling and go back to billing export. Now I'm going to select I forgot Selimi's bucket name. And then I'm going to call this, I don't know,GCP class export, just so that it's easy to remember. I'm going to export it to CSV. So now I'm going to go ahead and enable the billing export. You can see that the export is enabled. What will happen now is that it will publish to that bucket every day. So again, it's not automatic. You can't just, you know, on demand, create a report. It's done automatically every day. So again, you want to check with everyone to see when it's available. I don't know the exact times. It doesn't seem like it's actually a set time. It's usually available sometime in the morning. I don't know if it's done at 01:00 A.m.Or 7:00 a.m. or whatever, but it's done every morning. And you could easily log in and download your reports. So just do remember that these reports do take up a little bit of space. So there will be additional charges for your buckets. So delete them if you don't need them or save them if you want to save them. That's right, the cost is next to nothing, but just be aware of that.

6. Google Stackdriver Must Know

And even though I sort of knew what it was, I didn't know all the components and where they fit in. And that was sort of what they tested you on, and not only on the Cloud Architectexam, but also the Data Engineer exam. And I'm going to cover what you need to know for the Cloud Architect exam. As far as the Data Engineer exam, we're going to cover that separately because it covers sort of a deeper area but more narrow, whereas the Cloud Architect sort of covers a thousand foot to 500 foot level, whereas a Data Engineer really needs to know down to the 100 foot level to be able to do well in that exam. So let's talk about Stackdriver. The first thing that you want to know is that it is a hybrid monitoring, logging, and diagnostics featureset for applications on the Google Cloud platform and AWS. Now Google has purchased Stackdriver and they've rebranded it to Google Stackdriver. That's essentially the name difference. So the proper name is Google Stackdriver. I'm not following a good example already, am I? So, for short, Stackdriver; I'm going to say Stackdriver is Google Stackdriver, so don't send me emails complaining. Basically, Stackdriver monitors the cloud service layers in a single SaaS solution.

So basically, you have a single pane of glass utilising your typical console approach where you can login and monitor your GCP resources and AWS resources. And there is the potential to extend that to possibly open Stack as well. So again, if you have some good developers or programmers that are good with the SDKs, this can also be extended to native integration with Google CloudTools, BigQuery Cloud, Pub, sub-cloud storage, etc. So again, EC Two, you name it, app Engine. So a lot of other components you access through the cloud platform may have benefits you may want to know about. The first thing is that itmonitors the multi-cloud environment.

I'm going to go ahead and do a demo. So we'll go through a demo and I'll walk you through some of the interface and some of the features. I already set up an App Engine instance for us to go ahead and review, set up alerts, and see how that works. We'll go ahead and identify trends and prevent issues. The goal is to lower monitoring headaches,fix problems faster, and reduce monitoring noise. So, for example, One of the really nice features of this Compared to those that, for example, I have worked in a knock before and have used products like Splunk or HP Open View products. I forgot the new name off the top of my head. But typically, what can happen? Especially with a lot of monitoring products. Is that they'll send alerts and this happens at this time? This happened at that time. whereas with static drivers, it sort of automatically filters out. So if you get like a bunch of, let's say, 404 errors, okay?

And those 404 errors, you can basically see a hundred if you look at the log right with Snapdragon. It doesn't approach that way, it just lists that error once. And then if you want to drill down into how many instances you have and at what time, you can do that as well. major features like monitoring, debugging, logging, tracing, error reporting, and I'm going to go through each of these in detail here in a minute, but let's talk about how Stackdriver is really set up. So the first thing you want to know about Stackdriver is that Stackdriver is actually a separate account that you're going to need to set up. So basically, if you're in Google Cloud, you click the Stackdriver, and I'm going to walk everybody through this, of course, in the demo. And so basically, you would click on Stackdriver. It will bring you over to the Stackdriver website where you can log in and you can basically log in. Actually, you do want to log in with your GCP account that you want to use. And so you log in with that account. It will tie it to the projects. It will automatically, for example, if you have AppEngine instances running, it'll automatically pick up everything that you need for that App Engine project. If you want to extend out to other instances, for example,in GCP or AWS, it's very simple to do that.

And basically, one of the best practices,for example, is that you want to create a separate Stackdriver account, for example, that would monitor, for example, different accounts. So, for example, when it says multiple,you want to create a separate account. You basically monitor separate projects in GCP, for example. So, for example, if you have a development project going on or a production-related project or whatever, you go ahead and set up your accounts appropriately to accommodate that. And this is a nice little chart that shows how Stackdriver is sort of defined. You have monitoring, logging, error reporting, tracing, and a debugger. As far as Stackdriver, when we talk about monitoring, defaults are intelligent and dynamic. Okay, so what does that mean? Well, basically when you log in to your GCP account, basically when you log in to your Snapdragon usingGCP account, for example, it automatically picks up what you're doing, so it automatically populates. So again, you don't need to do too much work here. You could create your own health checks,whatever you want to do.

Let's say I'll walk you through a health check as well. You could set up health checks to basically monitor and validate performance, whatever you want to do. The metrics that you could use would be more around platform systems and applications. And so basically, the flow of this would be to ingest data, metrics, events, and metadata. And then you would go, of course, through the dashboard to view everything that you so choose. Now as far as the monitoring agent, you go ahead and use a curl to do that. Here would be the command to do those uptime checks. And again, we'll check on this. I just copied this. What I had actually done before this was I set up some checks on AppEngine and it started right around 1040 or so, and you can see that it started kicking off. And what I did is this check here monitors the six GCPglobal locations so that I know if there's an outage or something,it would let me know just as a simple test. And I also set up a Hello World application as well, and we'll go through some of that. The monitoring agents are forAWS, EC2, and GCP VMs. Now what's cool is that App Engine already has this built in and you can pretty much do nothing. You don't have to install the agent or anything. So you're good to go. So with App Engine, you don't need to worry about this command here to install the agent. So you would do this, for example, on GCP to install that agent on that virtual machine.

Now here again, with App Engine, you don't need to do anything. It's pretty much populated with the monitoring agent. Now for the test, you may want to know this. Actually, for the data engineer, you want to know that I'm going to highlight this as well. I'm going to underline that because, again, I want everyone to be successful. You want to know what that is? As of right now, with Container Engine, there is no support as of right now, but I assume down the road that will change. But who knows, I've seen nothing on the roadmap as of yet. Now you need to check your instances. You want to go to the monitor and check what is supported, of course. So let's talk about logging. With logging, it supports platform system and app logs. There is a 30-day retention. Now one of the things that I don't cover, and you don't need to totally know this for the testor whatever, is that there are two approaches to Stackdriver. You have the basic and then you have the premium, which is essentially where you get additional capabilities. So you'd have to pay extra to use the additional features. So it's 30 days with the premium, and then it's only seven days for the basics. So I'm going to put that in there since I meant to do that. Now you can go ahead and search and filter. A lot of this is better to talk about and walk you through with the demo, to be honest. Log base metrics and then you can set up alerts on logs as well. Now if you want to go ahead and install the logging agent, you can go ahead and do that and it's a separate agent. Remember, alert agents and monitoring agents are different. The logging agent is different. So again, you don't have to do this on App Engine. This is again for your VMs. With Stackdriver, you don't want to use substrings. So from a best practise standpoint, don't use substrings. So be careful with your syntax. Set up a filter. It's very easy to do. You could do that from a console or theCLI viewing interface. You can export logs. So, once you've gone past 30 days or seven days, you'll need to export your logs somewhere. It is probably cloud storage that would be the best fit. Unless you want to again export them out somewhere else, that's your call.

BigQuery So on the Data Engineer exam, this is probably focused around the Data Engineer exam, but I want to cover it for the architect because again,it wouldn't be especially if they updated questions or something that they didn't let anybody know they did,which wouldn't surprise me, is around like what you would do with Stackdriver to be able to search and analyse log files, for example. Or to visualise those log files, you could tie them into Data Lab Pub sub endpoints, for example. So this is definitely covered on the Data Engineer exam. I've not seen this on Architect, but again, it takes a minute to just get that in your head. I would do it because I wouldn't be surprised if they did update the test pool down the road here. Reporting.

Now when it comes to reporting, again, some of the things I skipped over, okay. When it comes to aggregating anddisplayers, you want to pay attention to how you're handling error notifications. The dashboards, again, you have a lot of customization here. You want to just focus on some of that. Languages here are supported and Trace. One of the areas on the Architect exam that they did ask about was understanding what part of Stackdriver you would need to think about considering if you had an application from an end-to-end approach, basically that needed to be analyzed. And so that really, for me personally,I think that's more data engineer focused. However, you must understand the distinction between, say, trace and debugging because, once again, one of the questions was attempting to confirm your understanding of whether you needed to use the trace debugging logging features in Stackdriver.

So just be aware of that bottleneck discovery. You know, again, with Trace you can analyse apps and generate reports to capture projects with App Engine. And there is a Trace SDK available for these languages as well. Now with tracing, again, tracing you're going to want to use for application discovery. Application issues, especially those around latency, are going to be one of the main use cases. So, for example, it's very common for web apps to have issues around performance, and latency is a big deal. So this tool is really what you want to use for working on that. Data is collected for the App Engine, of course. And you can also use this with the load balancers and stackdriver traces SDKs. And now let's touch on debugging briefly.

Now debugging is going to be focused around inspectingapplications where you don't have to stop it. So, for example, you have an issue with an application. It may be sporadic. Does it make sense to shut down that app or take it offline and move it from production to development and test or something? Now with this, you can run everything. And when I do the demo, I'm going to show you how this works. It's pretty slick, I have to say. It does have some great benefits because it gives you the visual as well as the details. You need to really analyse web performance, for example. So, pretty neat stuff. So again, it could be used with an app engine standard or flexible. This is what's supported for languages. And remember, there is an SDK for that. For some of these, you could also use this in conjunction with snapshots of your applications as well. So let's say you don't want to try this on your production app. Let's go ahead and work on a snapshot. You could also log points as well. So let's go ahead and get into the demo in the next module.

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