GKE Monitoring Tooling

Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) automatically collects logs and metrics for every cluster. This built‑in integration with the Cloud Operations suite makes it easy to troubleshoot workloads without deploying additional monitoring software.

Viewing Aggregated Logs

• Open the Logging page in the GKE console to see logs from both the control plane and your workloads.
• Filter logs by namespace, workload, or container to focus on a specific application.
• Aggregated logs persist beyond the life of a pod, unlike kubectl logs.

Inspecting Workload Metrics

1. Navigate to Workloads and select the Observability tab.
2. Review CPU and memory usage for each deployment or filter by namespace to scope the view.
3. The events feed records actions such as deployments or deletions, helping correlate spikes in metrics to changes you made.

Why Use GKE's Built‑In Tools?

• Google's observability platform is one of the most mature among managed Kubernetes offerings.
• Smaller providers such as Civo offer basic logging, but the experience is less integrated.
• You can always deploy your own stack (for example, Prometheus and Grafana), but with GKE you get useful dashboards out of the box.

Sample Manifests

The manifests used in this module can be found in the devops-directive-kubernetes-course repository. Deploy them to generate logs and metrics you can explore with the tooling above.