When you are experiencing an issue with your application or service, having deep visibility into both the infrastructure and the software powering your apps and services is critical. Most monitoring services provide insights at the Virtual Machine (VM) level, but few go further. To get a full picture of the state of your application or service, you need to know what processes are running on your infrastructure. That visibility into the processes running on your VMs is provided out of the box by the new Ops Agent and made available by default in Cloud Monitoring. Today we will cover how to access process metrics and why you should start monitoring them. 

Better visibility with process metrics

The data gathered by process metrics include CPU, memory, I/O, number of threads, and more, for any running processes and services on your VMs. When the Ops Agent or the Cloud Monitoring agent is installed, these metrics are captured at 60-second intervals and sent to Cloud Monitoring so you can visualize, analyze, track, and alert on them. A single VM may run tens or hundreds of processes, while you may have tens of thousands running across your fleet of VMs. 

As a developer, you may only care about seeing inside a single VM to troubleshoot and identify memory leaks or the source of performance issues.

As an operator or IT Admin, you may be interested in aggregate resource consumption, building baseline views of compute, storage, and networking usage across your VM fleet. Then, when those baseline consumption levels break normal behaviors, you will know when to investigate your systems.

Built for scale and ease of use

Cloud Monitoring is built on the same advanced backend that powers metrics across Google. This proven scalability means your metrics ingestion will be supported despite the extremely high cardinality. Additionally, our agents do not require any config file changes to turn on process metric monitoring.

Lastly, our goal is to provide you the observability and telemetry data where, and when, you need it. So, like the rest of the operations suite, we deliver process metrics in the context of your infrastructure, directly in the VM admin console.

The navigation is simple. Once you have the Ops Agent or the Cloud Monitoring agent installed in your VMs:

1. Go to the Compute Engine console page and click on VM Instances 
2. Select the VM that you want to investigate
3. In the navigation menu on the top, click Observability
4. Click on Metrics
5. Lastly, click on Processes

In the window on the right you will see a chart and a table with all of the processes in your VM. You can also filter by time frame and sort by name or value. You do not need to do anything, other than have the agent installed, for the process to be detected and displayed.

Fleet-wide metrics monitoring

Cloud Monitoring gives you a look across your fleet of VMs so you can identify the aggregated usage of resources by processes. This level of broad, yet granular, insight can drive your decisions around which software to run or how many VMs you need to optimally power your apps and services. Admins can perform a cost-savings analysis if they determine that certain processes are slowing down the work of a large number of VMs. The larger numbers of less powerful VMs can be replaced by fewer, more capable VMs.   

To get this fleet-wide view:

1. Navigate to Cloud Monitoring 
2. Click Dashboards in the left menu
3. In the All Dashboards list, click on VM Instances
4. Towards the top of the window, click on Processes

This provides many charts detailing the processes running across your fleet of VMs.

Get started today

To start identifying and monitoring your process metrics, you must first install the Ops Agent, or have installed the legacy Cloud Monitoring agent. Once that is complete, the process metrics data will automatically be ingested into Cloud Monitoring and the VM admin console.

If you have any questions, or to join the conversation with other developers, operators, DevOps, and SREs, visit the Cloud Operations page in the Google Cloud Community.

As organizations expand their use of cloud computing services, more of their sensitive data inevitably moves to and lives in the cloud. Much of this sensitive data is unstructured and can be challenging to secure. Despite this potential challenge, the usefulness of cloud for data storage and processing is too big for most organizations to ignore and has in turn led to data sprawl, where their sensitive data is spread over many resources, both in the cloud and on-premise. Addressing data sprawl requires solutions that can discover, manage, and secure sensitive data, especially unstructured data, as it spreads.

To help organizations confidently move their sensitive data to the cloud, Google Cloud works diligently to earn and maintain customer trust. Control and transparency are pillars of our approach to offering a trusted cloud. Therefore, we’ve been expanding our capabilities to act on unstructured data as sprawl increases.

Given the importance of these capabilities to our strategy, we are happy to announce today that Forrester Research has named Google Cloud a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Unstructured Data Security Platforms, Q2 2021 report, and rated Google Cloud highest in the current offering category among the providers evaluated.

The report evaluates the 11 most significant providers with platform solutions to secure and protect unstructured data, spanning from cloud providers to data security-focused vendors. The report notes that “Google offers breadth and depth with built-in data security in the cloud. Google Cloud Platform, Google Workspace, and BeyondCorp Enterprise have underlying data security products and features for protecting customer data.”

Google Cloud tools focused on protecting unstructured data were developed and battle-tested internally at Google to alleviate some of our own data security challenges. This brings the best of Google security to the organizations utilizing Google Cloud and our security tools. The report highlights that “Google productizes capabilities originally developed to secure its own business, and brings a disciplined approach to product enhancements for enterprise requirements. It serves a wide range of enterprise and mid-market, with a focus on emphasizing data protection needs by industry. ”

Google Cloud’s data security strategy focuses on meeting customers wherever they are in their cloud migration journey. The report highlights that “Google further enables a Zero Trust approach with third-party integrations through its BeyondCorp Alliance of partners in device management, endpoint security and gateways.”

Google Cloud received the highest possible score in sixteen criteria, in total receiving the most 5 out of 5 ratings among all vendors assessed. These criteria include: Data Intelligence, Access Control, Deletion, Obfuscation-Scope, Obfuscation-Key Management, Deployment, Security and Risk, APIs and Integration, Data Security Platform Vision, Data Security Execution Roadmap, Performance, Planned Enhancements, Zero Trust Enabling Partner Ecosystem, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, Installed Base, and Revenue. 

Notably, Google Cloud received the highest possible score in the Obfuscation criteria. Obfuscation can help protect sensitive data, like personally identifiable information (PII), which is critical to many enterprise workflows. Cloud DLP helps customers inspect and mask this sensitive data with techniques like redaction, bucketing, and tokenization, which help strike the balance between risk and utility. This is especially crucial when dealing with unstructured or free-text workloads, in which it can be challenging to know what data to redact. More than 150 detectors combine to power Cloud DLP’s masking, which can be deployed in data migrations and business workloads like real-time data collection and processing. For Obfuscation specifically, the report mentioned that Google “takes a broad view of DLP, which includes in-line redaction of sensitive elements in unstructured data and DLP APIs that extend support to additional data types like images or other media.”

We are honored to be a Leader in The Forrester Wave™ Unstructured Data Security Platforms Q2 2021 report, and look forward to continuing to innovate and partner with you on ways to make your digital transformation journey safer as we work to become your most trusted Cloud.

A copy of the full report can be viewed here.

In the last year, there’s been an upward trend in cloud adoption in India. In fact, NASSCOM finds that cloud spending in India is estimated to grow at 30% per annum to cross the US$7 billion mark by 2022.

At Google, in our conversations with customers, discussions have evolved beyond cost savings and efficiencies. While those are still very relevant reasons for adopting cloud technologies, Indian enterprises are looking to Google Cloud to help them drive digital transformation, identify new revenue generating business models, reach previously untapped consumer markets, and build customer loyalty through greater insight and personalization.

Here are some companies and their stories.

Tata Steel: Mining data and maximizing its power

Tata Steel is a great example of an established enterprise from a traditional industry that is modernizing and embracing cloud computing. With an ambition to be a leader in manufacturing in India and a digital-first organization by 2022, Tata Steel believes smart analytics is key to enhancing operational efficiency and gaining business advantage. 

To organize data from siloed systems across the organization and make it easily accessible to all employees, Tata Steel is using Cloud Search and plans to scale it to more than one million documents and 28 disparate enterprise content sources including enterprise resource planning (ERP) and SharePoint. In fact, Tata Steel is one of the first Indian enterprises to harness the power of Cloud Search to meet some of the most aggressive ingestion demands, with indexing durations reduced from weeks to seconds.

They are also leveraging Google Cloud Platform (GCP) services like Google Cloud Storage and BigQuery to build their data lake and enterprise data warehouse so they can take advantage of advanced analytics and machine learning. Managed services such as AI Platform further enable Tata Steel to manage end-to-end AI/ML workflows within the GCP console. This complements their existing on-premise reporting and analytics tools, and brings data management to the forefront of everything they do—from forecasting market demand to predictive equipment maintenance.

“Digital is not just a goal, it’s become a way of life. We are digitizing everything from the deployment of factory vehicles to improving material throughput to marketing and sales. As a result, we have petabytes of structured and unstructured data that is not only waiting to be mined, but that we can generate intelligence from to create opportunities across our multiple lines of business using GCP,” said Sarajit Jha, Chief Business Transformation & Digital Solutions at Tata Steel.

Helping L&T Financial Services reach customers in rural communities

In rural communities, quick access to financial services can make a tremendous difference to livelihoods. L&T Financial Services provides farm-equipment finance, micro loans and two-wheeler finance to consumers across rural India backed by a strong digital and analytics platform. Their digital-loan approval app, which runs on GCP, makes it significantly faster and easier for people to apply for financial assistance to purchase important things such as farming equipment and two-wheelers. It also helps rural women entrepreneurs get quicker access to funds for their businesses through micro loans.

L&T Financial found G Suite to be a far better collaborative tool to help staff work together efficiently. Employees can interact with each other in real time using Hangouts Meet, and the task of information sharing is more seamless and secure through Drive. BigQuery also helps L&T Financial Services generate behavior scorecards to track credit quality of its micro-loan customers.

“Cloud is the technology that enables us to achieve scale and reach. Today there are countless data points available about rural consumers which enable us to personalize our products to serve them better. With access to faster compute power, we can also on-board consumers more efficiently. Our rural businesses have clocked a disbursement CAGR of 60% over the past three years.” said Sunil Prabhune, Chief Executive-Rural Finance, and Group Head-Digital, IT and Analytics, L&T Financial Services.

Creating conversational connections for Digitate’s customers

Digitate, a venture of TCS (Tata Consultancy Services), has integrated Dialogflow into its flagship brand ignio, an award-winning artificial intelligence platform for driving IT operations, workload operations and ERP operations for diverse enterprises. This integration is the next step in ignio’s product development journey, and will enable users to chat or talk with ignio to detect issues, triage problems, resolve them and even predict system behavior.

“ignio combines its unique self-healing AIOps capabilities for enterprise IT and business operations with Dialogflow’s AI/ML-based, easy to use, natural and rich conversational capabilities to create an unparalleled, intuitive and feature-rich experience for our customers,” says Akhilesh Tripathi, Head of Digitate.

Indian enterprises going G Suite

The base of Indian enterprises that are making the switch to G Suite to streamline their productivity and collaboration also continues to grow. Sharechat, BookMyShow, Hero MotorCorp, DB Corp and Royal Enfield are now able to move faster within their organizations, using intelligent, cloud-based apps to transform the way they work.

A hybrid and multi-cloud future in India

IDC predicts that by 2023, 55% of India 500 organizations will have a multi-cloud management strategy that includes integrated tools across public and private clouds. (IDC FutureScape: Worldwide Cloud 2019 Predictions  — India Implications (# AP43922319). We look forward to sharing more success stories of Indian enterprises that have taken the next step in their digital transformation journey.

Kohl’s is an omnichannel retailer focused on driving traffic, operational efficiency and delivering seamless omnichannel customer experiences.

Ratnakar Lavu is Kohl’s Senior Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer. He, and Kohl’s, are at the forefront of retail technology innovation, focusing on a frictionless customer journey across digital, mobile and more than 1,150 stores.

As part of this journey to more closely unify its online and offline experiences for customers, the company was looking for supporting cloud services that would continue to drive  best-in-class data center infrastructure; the ability to manage data at a very large scale; and industry leading analytics and machine learning tools to continually understand real time data streams and help personalize experiences for their customers.

Kohl’s recognized the opportunity to take on a cloud partner to help drive the improvement of the speed and reliability of their operations, while they focused on a number of innovations to deepen customer experiences.

“At the time, I was looking for an open and scalable platform to partner with our Kohl’s technology team as we transform our business by shifting to the cloud,” says Ratnakar.

“Google has great engineering talent as well as demonstrated experience solving stability and scale in its own Ads and Search business. At Kohl’s, we need to be bold and innovative in today’s retail environment, and therefore need partners who deeply understand how to manage risk.” 

Kohl’s leveraged several capabilities of Google Cloud. For example:

• They built applications to automate deployment, scaling and operations.
• They used monitoring capabilities to monitor for things like response time.
• Scalable technology provided an infrastructure to elastically scale to site traffic.
• They ran their infrastructure across multiple regions for high availability.

In 2017 and 2018, record-setting numbers of customers visited Kohls.com during the Thanksgiving holiday weekend and the digital platform experienced high double-digit growth both years.

The capabilities provided by Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Google’s data center infrastructure supported Kohl’s servers and systems during these key timeframes.

In addition, the Kohl’s team partnered together with Google’s core engineering team and services organization to optimize applications and make them more reliable.

Google Cloud’s Customer Reliability Engineers (CREs) worked with them in advance of their peak time frames to test the infrastructure for performance, scaling, and fault tolerance.

“Google CRE and services teams collaborated with us as we ran drills and exercises during each phase of preparation for peak time frames,” Ratnakar said. “As we continued to understand better how to scale, monitor, and support our applications in GCP and we are pleased that we worked with the CRE team as partners on monitoring services, alerting teams, and triaging work.”

In an industry as highly regulated as healthcare, building a single secure and compliant application that tracks patient care and appointments at a clinic requires a great deal of planning from development and security teams. So, imagine what it would be like to build a solution that includes almost everything related to a patient’s healthcare, including insurance and billing. That’s what Highmark Health (Highmark)—a U.S. health and wellness organization that provides millions of customers with health insurance plans, a physician and hospital network, and a diverse portfolio of businesses–decided to do. 

Highmark is developing a solution called Living Health to re-imagine healthcare delivery, and it is using Google Cloud and the Google Cloud Professional Services Organization (PSO) to build and maintain the innovation platform supporting this forward thinking experience. Considering all the personal information that different parties like insurers, specialists, billers and coders, clinics, and hospitals share, Highmark must build security and compliance into every part of the solution. 

In this blog, we look at how Highmark Health and Google are using a technique called “secure-by-design” to address the security, privacy, and compliance aspects of bringing Living Health to life.

Secure-by-design: Preventive care for development

In healthcare, preventing an illness or condition is the ideal outcome. Preventive care often involves early intervention—a course of ideas and actions to ward off illness, permanent injury, and so on. Interestingly, when developing a groundbreaking delivery model like Living Health, it’s a good idea to take the same approach to security, privacy, and compliance. 

That’s why Highmark’s security and technology teams worked with their Google Cloud PSO team to implement secure-by-design for every step of design, development, and operations. Security is built into the entire development process rather than waiting until after implementation to reactively secure the platform or remediate security gaps. 

It’s analogous to choosing the right brakes for a car before it rolls off the assembly line instead of having an inspector shut down production because the car failed its safety tests. The key aspect of secure-by-design is an underlying application architecture created from foundational building blocks that sit on top of a secure cloud infrastructure. Secure-by-design works to ensure that these building blocks are secure and compliant before moving on to development.

The entire approach requires security, development, and cloud teams to work together with other stakeholders. Most importantly, it requires a cloud partner, cloud services, and a cloud infrastructure that can support it. 

Finding the right cloud and services for secure-by-design 

Highmark chose Google Cloud because of its leadership in analytics, infrastructure services, and platform as a service. In addition, Google Cloud has made strategic investments in healthcare interoperability and innovation, which was another key reason Highmark decided to work with Google. As a result, Highmark felt that Google Cloud and the Google Cloud PSO were best suited for delivering on the vision of Living Health—its security and its outcomes. 

“Google takes security more seriously than the other providers we considered, which is very important to an organization like us. Cloud applications and infrastructure for healthcare must be secure and compliant,” explains Highmark Vice President and Chief Information Security Officer, Omar Khawaja. 

Forming a foundation for security and compliance

How does security-by-design with services work? It starts with the creation and securing of the foundational platform, allowing teams to harden and enforce specified security controls. It’s a collaborative process that starts with input from cross-functional teams—not just technology teams—using terms they understand, so that everyone has a stake in the design. 

A strong data governance and protection program classifies and segments workloads based on risk and sensitivity. Teams build multiple layers of defense into the foundational layers to mitigate against key industry risks. Google managed services such as VPC Service Controls help prevent unauthorized access. Automated controls such as those in Data Loss Prevention help teams quickly classify data and identify and respond to potential sources of data risk. Automation capabilities help ensure that security policies are enforced.

After the foundational work is done, it’s time to assess and apply security controls to the different building blocks, which are Google Cloud services such as Google Kubernetes Engine, Google Compute Engine, and Google Cloud Storage. The goal is to make sure that these and similar building blocks, or any combination of them, do not introduce additional risks and to ensure any identified risks are remediated or mitigated. 

Enabling use cases, step by step

After the foundational security is established, the security-by-design program enables the Google Cloud services that developers then use to build use cases that form Living Health. The service enablement approach allows Highmark to address complexity by providing the controls most relevant for each individual service. 

For each service, the teams begin by determining the risks and the controls that can reduce them. The next step is enforcing preventive and detective controls across various tools. After validation, technical teams can be granted an authorization to operate, also called an ATO. An ATO authorizes the service for development in a use case.

For use cases with greater data sensitivity, the Highmark teams validate the recommended security controls with an external trust assessor, who uses the HITRUST Common Security Framework, which maps to certifications and compliance such as HIPAA, NIST, GDPR, and more. A certification process follows that can take anywhere from a few weeks to a few months. In addition to certification, there is ongoing monitoring of the environment for events, behavior, control effectiveness, and control lapses or any deviation from the controls.

The approach simplifies compliance for developers by abstracting compliance requirements away. The process provides developers a set of security requirements written in the language of the cloud, rather than in the language of compliance, providing more prescriptive guidance as they build solutions. Through the secure-by-design program, the Highmark technology and security teams, Google, the business, and the third-party trust assessor all contribute to a secure foundation for any architectural design with enabled Google Cloud services as building blocks. 

Beating the learning curve 

Thanks to the Living Health project, the Highmark technology and security teams are trying new methods. They are exploring new tools for building secure applications in the cloud. They are paying close attention to processes and the use case steps and, when necessary, aligning different teams to execute. Because everyone is working together collaboratively toward a shared goal, teams are delivering more things on time and with predictability, which has reduced volatility and surprises. 

The secrets to success: Bringing everyone to the table early and with humility

Together, Highmark and Google Cloud PSO have created over 24 secure-by-design building blocks by bringing everyone to the table early and relying on thoughtful, honest communication. Input for the architecture design produced for Highmark came from privacy teams, legal teams, security teams, and the teams that are building the applications. And that degree of collaboration ultimately leads to a much better product because everyone has a shared sense of responsibility and ownership of what was built. 

Delivering a highly complex solution like Living Health takes significant, more purposeful communication and execution. It is also important to be honest and humble. The security, technology, and Google teams have learned to admit when something isn’t working and to ask for help or ideas for a solution. The teams are also able to accept that they don’t have all the answers, and that they need to figure out solutions by experimenting. Khawaja puts it simply, “That level of humility has been really important and enabled us to have the successes that we’ve had. And hopefully that’ll be something that we continue to retain in our DNA.”