GCP Sessions

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) offers a range of tools for computing, storage, networking, and AI.

This page covers essential questions to help you manage and monitor your GCP resources, improve performance, and ensure security.

Key areas of focus

Below are some useful questions to ask when managing your GCP cloud account:

General resource management

• What resources are currently active in my GCP account?
• How much am I spending across GCP services, and which services have the highest costs?
• Are there any underused resources that can be adjusted to reduce costs?

Compute engine

• Which virtual machines (VMs) are running, and what is their CPU and memory usage?
• Are there any VMs with high CPU utilization in the past 24 hours?
• How do I check the network traffic for a specific VM instance?

Cloud storage

• How much data is stored in my Cloud Storage buckets?
• Which buckets have public access permissions?
• Are there any objects taking up significant space in my largest storage buckets?

Kubernetes engine

• What clusters are running in my GKE environment, and what resources are they using?
• Are there any Kubernetes clusters with recent health issues?
• How do I monitor the node utilization across my clusters?

Cloud functions

• Which Cloud Functions have the highest invocation rates?
• Are there any functions that haven’t been used recently?
• How can I check for any timeouts or failures in my Cloud Functions?

Monitoring & alerts

• What are the active alerts in Cloud Monitoring?
• How do I get an overview of recent metrics for critical services like Compute Engine and Cloud SQL?
• Can I view the history of any breached alert thresholds?

Security & IAM

• Are there any inactive IAM users or roles in my GCP account?
• Which users have administrator permissions, and when was their last login?
• How can I check for outdated or inactive API keys?