Link Your Google Cloud Platform to New Relic With a Service Account

With Google Cloud Next ’18 happening in San Francisco the week of July 24 - 26, it’s a perfect time to talk about the ability to link your Google Cloud Platform (GCP) projects to New Relic through a Google service account. That means you can now easily control New Relic access to your GCP projects by adding a service account to your projects; you’ll have immediate access to metrics in your cloud infrastructure.

Don’t miss New Relic at Google Cloud Next ’18—we’re at booth #S1125 in the Moscone Center South Lobby.

Now more than ever, cloud computing service providers like GCP are helping modern software companies move faster—iterate faster, deliver new features faster, and scale faster. At New Relic, we’re working to support our customers on all the major cloud platforms, including GCP, because you can’t move fast in the cloud if you’re not well instrumented.

Link your GCP projects to New Relic and start monitoring in minutes

When we released our most recent GCP integrations in May, the authorization flow was based on Google user accounts. This flow was convenient and fast, letting users complete the authorization process through the new Relic UI in a few seconds, without the need for configuring anything on Google Cloud Console.

Now, we’ve made getting started monitoring GCP with New Relic more flexible—by giving you the option of linking your GCP projects to New Relic by means of a Google service account. Not only is this capability aligned with best practices for application authorization, but it’s secure, quick, and lets you start analyzing GCP data within minutes.

Unlike other monitoring vendors, New Relic creates the service account for you. Thus, you’re not required to manage the service account private key, which is the secret credential New Relic uses to access Google’s APIs: you don’t need to download them from GCP, upload them to New Relic, or securely store them. This saves time and provides additional security, as the linking process is faster, easier, and less error prone for your teams, because they don’t need to manage authentication credentials.

To get started linking GCP project to New Relic using a service account, follow these six steps:

1. Enable the Google Stackdriver Monitoring API for any GCP project you intend to monitor.
2. In New Relic, navigate to Infrastructure > Integrations, and select Google Cloud Platform.
3. Click Add a New Project and select Authorize a Service Account.
4. Copy the service account ID provided to you by New Relic, and add it to your GCP project. (You can add your service account ID to more than one project to link all of them at the same time.)
5. Assign a Viewer Role to your service account.
6. Follow the remaining prompts to select the projects and cloud services you want to monitor.

New Relic Infrastructure GCP integrations

When you move from a static data center to the dynamic cloud, everything changes, including your monitoring. You can’t always bring your old monitoring tools; they may have been built for static data center environments and could fail in a dynamic cloud environment. To optimize the cloud, you have to understand the context connecting the applications you build and the cloud services that power them. New Relic provides monitoring into several GCP services.

In addition, you don’t want to have to download and install different plugins for each GCP service. With New Relic Infrastructure, you can monitor multiple GCP integrations in one place:

• Google Kubernetes Engine: Google designed GKE to eliminate the need to install, manage, and operate your own Kubernetes clusters. You can use Infrastructure’s Kubernetes on-host integration to gather metrics from your clusters, or use Google Kubernetes Engine integration, a lightweight alternative to get visibility into containers, nodes, and pods.
• Google Compute Engine: This service lets users create, manage, and run virtual machines in GCP. Our GCE integration complements the metrics and attributes collected by the Infrastructure agent. The out-of-the-box dashboard shows the number of virtual machines (VMs) running and their status, the throttled disk read-and-write operations, and other metrics. You can set up alerts based on parameters you define with the New Relic Query Language (NRQL) to monitor a VM’s status, or monitor the throttling of a VM’s disk.
• Google Cloud Storage: You use Google Cloud Storage to serve website content, to store data for archival and disaster recovery, and to distribute data objects via direct download. Apart from storage buckets inventory, our Google Cloud Storage integration provides metrics such as the number of API calls and transmitted bytes.
• Google Cloud Functions: This service lets you run serverless code functions that abstract code development from the underlying infrastructure. New Relic users can observe how much and how often every function is used, and their execution time evolution.
• Google App Engine: App Engine is Google’s Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) for developing and hosting mobile and web applications. It offers two types of environments: the Standard environment comes with a set of preconfigured runtimes, while the Flexible environment runs applications within custom Docker containers. Relevant metrics to monitor include the number of requests that end with an error, the number of requests that fail because an app is over quota, and the HTTP response latency.

(For more detailed information, see Perfect Your Cloud Experience With New Relic’s Google Cloud Platform Integrations.)

Each of these integrations are built into New Relic Infrastructure and all the data available from these integrations is captured in New Relic Insights, ready for you to analyze.

Perfecting your GCP experience

If you’re thinking of moving to GCP—or have already done so—New Relic can give you confidence that you’ve properly prioritized your migration, that you’re optimizing cloud resources, and that you’ve future proofed your applications and infrastructure. You’ll also be able to verify dependencies and code stability when you move your workloads to GCP.

Quickly identifying bottlenecks and understanding the relationships between different components in a cloud-native application is a critical part of monitoring GCP. With New Relic, you can see the exact response time of each component for each transaction, not just the aggregate metrics associated with those transactions. For example, if a support engineer reports that customers of your e-commerce site are getting an error when checking out, you can examine the New Relic-monitored tiers of your application stack to find the exact set of transactions that caused the error.

With almost a decade of experience, New Relic supports seven languages out of the box, with no manual configuration or code changes required. In addition, New Relic APM service maps provide a valuable visual representation of the connections between components, allowing you to track a performance issue across all touchpoints. Once you’ve identified an issue, trace data lets you identify the associated code that is causing it, helping you find and fix things faster. Our innovative Health Map visualization integrates our industry-leading APM and infrastructure monitoring data to help operations and DevOps teams better understand and troubleshoot their applications.

It’s time to perfect your GCP experience with New Relic.