Managing the capacity of your GCP infrastructure

As the flow diagram illustrates, the data source (Google Cloud Platform - GCP API ETL) collects data from the GCP console. The collected data is transferred to the Capacity Optimization data warehouse where it is processed, and then displayed on the user interface. You can use the product features to review, analyze, and manage the capacity of your GCP infrastructure. 

The following sections describe how you can achieve these goals:

• Manage the capacity of GCP infrastructure  
• Perform advanced analysis
• Manage future demand

Managing the capacity of GCP infrastructure

You can analyze and manage the capacity of your GCP infrastructure elements by using the GCP VM Instances view. For the GCP data to be available in the view, the Administrator must first set up the data sources to collect data. 

Step 1. Collect data and install the views

As an Administrator, you can use the Google-Cloud-Platform-GCP-API-Extractor to collect data from the GCP VM instances.

• Configure and run this ETL to collect the required configuration and performance metrics from the VM instances.
• In addition to the required metrics collected by using the GCP API Extractor, you can create a Stackdriver account and install the Monitoring agent on each of your virtual machines to collect additional performance metrics from them. These metrics are useful for investigating the capacity-related issues that might occur in your Google Cloud environment. When you run the GCP API ETL, these metrics are imported into the TrueSight Capacity Optimization database. For more information, see Collecting-additional-metrics-using-the-Stackdriver-monitoring.

(Optional) You can also use the BMC-TrueSight-Capacity-Optimization-Gateway-VIS-files-parser to collect additional metrics, more accurate memory utilization metrics, and performance metrics at a higher granularity. Before you use this ETL, you must instrument the VMs. 

After data collection starts, data is loaded in the data warehouse daily and Indicators are available in the Workspace.

As an Administrator, you must install the GCP views and Business Services view and grant the necessary permissions to Capacity Planners and GCP Technology Specialists to access these views. While creating the service pools, ensure to select GCP domains to view GCP only data.

Step 2. Analyze the collected data

To get a high-level view of the GCP infrastructure usage and health at the business services and service pools level, use the Business Services view.

For detailed analysis, use the GCP-views.

The following common use cases are described here:

Performing advanced analysis

The earlier sections explained how you can use the out-of-the-box capacity views to manage your environment. These capacity views help you analyze your GCP infrastructure using a predefined set of metrics.

To perform advanced analysis on the imported GCP data, such as identifying specific performance issues, trends, and bottlenecks, you can use Analysis.

Here are some use cases for which you can create and use Analyses:

For more examples, see Creating-an-analysis.

Managing future demand

By using the capacity views and analysis charts, you can analyze the data of your existing capacity. To predict and plan your IT resource needs, use Models.