Visualizing trends in your logs is critical when troubleshooting an issue with your application. Using the histogram in Logs Explorer, you can quickly visualize log volumes over time to help spot anomalies, detect when errors started and see a breakdown of log volumes. But static visualizations are not as helpful as having more options for customization during your investigations. 

That’s why we’re excited to announce that we recently added three new query controls along with separate colors for log severity to the histogram. These new features make it even easier to refine and analyze your logs by time range. The new histogram controls help find logs before or after the current period, jump to a specific time range represented in a histogram bar and zoom in/out of the current time window in the histogram.

Histogram colors

The histogram now makes it easier to view the breakdown of logs by severity with the introduction of color coding. For example, the severity colors make it easy to spot an increasing number of errors even when the volume of requests is relatively constant. Looking at the histogram below, the red vs blue shading makes it clear that there has been an increase in overall log volume and provides a visual breakdown of errors within that log volume.

Pan left/right to scroll through time

Sometimes in your troubleshooting journey, you may want to look at the logs directly before or after the current set of logs. Perhaps there was an unexpected spike in errors at the beginning of the time range and you need to see the logs in the time period directly preceding the current time range. Pressing the left arrow on the left side of the histogram shifts the time range earlier while the arrow on the right side of the histogram shifts the time range ahead. Either arrow will refine the time range in the query and rerun the query to return the logs in the new time range.

Zooming in or out 

Zooming in or out from a given time range may be useful to visualize fine-grained details or a broader trend Clicking the zoom in or out icons in the upper right corner of the histogram refines the time range in the query and then reruns the query, returning the logs in the newly defined time range.

Scrolling to time 

If you see a large spike in logs volume in the histogram, it’s useful to quickly review the logs generated during that spike. Clicking on the histogram bar that contains the spike now scrolls you to the logs generated during that time period.

Where to find the histogram 

The histogram is a panel in Logs Explorer that can be displayed or hidden using the controls in the Page Layout menu. When you no longer want to display the histogram, click the “X” button in the upper right corner to quickly close it. To open it again, use the same Page Layout menu to enable the histogram display.

Get started with the histogram

These improvements move the histogram from a utility for visualization to an integral part of the troubleshooting journey. We are continuously working to launch new features that make Cloud Logging the best place to troubleshoot your Google Cloud logs. If you are not already a Cloud Logging user, review this getting started documentation or watch a quick video on troubleshooting services on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) to learn more. If you have specific questions or feedback, please join the discussion on our Google Cloud Community, Cloud Operations page.

Looking back on the past year, I see challenges—but also reinvention. Reinvention in how children are educated. Reinvention in how medical professionals provide care. Reinvention in how customers purchase products. This reinvention was made possible by all of the IT leaders around the world who had a vision about what could be possible with technology.

Technology has allowed people to work and complete critical activities safely outside of their standard locations. But, it has also enabled transformation in ways we have not seen before: in how people collaborate, in how businesses operate, and most important to me, in how organizations innovate.

Rethinking what it means to transform

The leading indicator for organizations that are accelerating their innovation during this time is how they are thinking about transformation. Instead of asking infrastructure questions about where their apps and services should run, they are asking transformation questions about how to build an environment that enables every person, process, and technology to adapt in order to bring the highest level of innovation to the business. 

Innovative companies have moved beyond migrating their data centers to the cloud, changing not only where their business is done but, more importantly, how it is done. For example, Papa John’s recently announced they are building a digital platform that looks at real-time data across the business to improve its loyalty programs, website, and customer and partner experiences. Albertsons Companies is transforming itself by reinventing grocery shopping, both the digital and physical aisle, through shoppable maps, AI-powered conversational commerce, and predictive grocery list building. Airbus is reimagining their work environment to embrace the hybrid work reality. And Siemens is partnering with Google Cloud to reinvent industrial manufacturing with AI to empower employees, automate mundane tasks, and improve product quality.  

Here, transformation is made possible with technologies that enable new innovations for their customers versus decisions about where infrastructure should be run. And this aligns with a recent study by Forrester that states the top two IT initiatives for the next 12 months are to increase innovation and to invest in technology that helps employees do their jobs better.¹

Some of the best conversations I’ve had with customers are focused on how to:

• Accelerate transformation while also maintaining the freedom to adapt to market needs.
• Make every employee—data scientists to sales associates—smarter with real-time data to make the best decisions.
• Bring people together and enable them to communicate, collaborate, and share with each other when they can not meet in person.
• Protect everything that matters to us—our people, our customers, our data, our customers’ data, and each transaction we undertake.

This new customer thinking is driving new technology requirements—requirements that can be solved through a transformation cloud. A transformation cloud accelerates an organization’s digital transformation through app and infrastructure modernization, data democratization, people connections, and trusted transactions. The result is an organization – and its workers –  that can take advantage of all of the benefits of cloud computing to drive innovation.

The new requirements for innovation

Organizations want to work with multiple cloud providers to choose the best technology for each of their apps and services while also mitigating against inevitable cloud outages and vendor lock in. They value the flexibility of open source based solutions and look to our multicloud platforms like Google Kubernetes Engine and Anthos to instill freedom in how they innovate and drive differentiated customer experiences. It is no surprise that, in a recent Google-commissioned IDG research study, 78% of Global IT leaders stated that multi/hybrid cloud support is a major consideration when selecting a cloud provider and 74% preferred open source cloud solutions.² Customers like MLB, DenizBank, and Macquarie Bank understand the necessity of a multicloud strategy and are taking advantage of Google Cloud’s open, hybrid architecture to give them the maximum flexibility to run their business how and where they want.

These organizations also want to use data to better understand their customers, enhance their products, and improve inventory accuracy in order to make real-time decisions—and bring it together into a cohesive data cloud. They value how analytics solutions democratize access to data for all employees and how embedded AI helps them predict and automate the future. The Forrester study mentioned above also shows that companies focused on improving their use of data for better decision-making, are taking actions to improve data self-service capabilities and make access to data and insights more democratic.³ Customers like Twitter, PayPal, The Home Depot, HSBC, and Stanford Medicine, unify their data across their organizations to power deeper AI-driven business insights, make better real-time decisions, and build and run their data-driven applications. 

And while technology is driving many of the transformations we see, so are an organization’s people. Workers are finding new ways to strengthen human connections, deepen their impact, and serve customers while transforming how work happens—as shown in the fact that 59% of organizations in the IDG study accelerated or newly introduced remote working and collaboration capabilities in 2020.⁴ Customers like Kia Motors, Cambridge Health Alliance, and PwC are using Google Workspace to enable teams of all sizes to connect, create,  collaborate, and to drive innovation from any device, and any location.

Finally, the innovation that we see in every digital transaction is matched with new ways to protect and secure the business. Organizations want to protect their employees, customers, and partners against emerging threats, analyze massive amounts of data to secure infrastructure, and build a long term strategy for strategic governance of their assets regardless of their location. Getting this right is essential as organizations see security as a top pain point impeding innovation.⁵ Customers like Equifax and Evernote are using Google Cloud’s secure platform and security products to extend customer confidence anywhere their systems may operate.

Google Cloud technologies are already powering customers’ transformation clouds

Supporting our customers’ reinventions are our top priority and we believe that together, we can pave the way for what is next. With our investments in multicloud and AI/ML, to sustainable infrastructure, industry solutions, and technology that improves our communities, such as COVID-19 vaccine distribution, we are proud that our customers trust Google Cloud solutions to digitally transform their business.

We have lots more to tell you about in the coming months, starting with our Data Cloud Summit on May 26th. Between this event, and the multiple other events we have this summer, you will learn about how our industry leadership and collaboration with our partners are enabling our customers to build powerful transformation clouds to support their continued reinvention.

^{1. Forrester Analytics Business Technographics® Priorities And Journey Survey, 2021
2. IDG Communications, Inc: “No Turning Back: How the Pandemic Has Reshaped Digital Business Agendas”, 2021
3. Of the companies that prioritize data in decision making, 37% are improving data self-service capabilities and 30% are making access to data and insights more democratic (Forrester Analytics Business Technographics® Priorities And Journey Survey, 2021)
4. IDG Communications, Inc, “No Turning Back: How the Pandemic Has Reshaped Digital Business Agendas”, 2021
5. 33% of organizations stated Security risks & concerns as a top pain point impeding innovation (IDG Communications, Inc, “No Turning Back: How the Pandemic Has Reshaped Digital Business Agendas”, 2021)}

About DB Corp

DB Corp is India’s largest newspaper publisher delivering 62 editions in four languages and selling about 62 million copies per day. The business also has an extensive online and mobile presence.

Industries: Media & Entertainment

Location: India

Headquartered in Bhopal, India, and listed on the Bombay Stock Exchange, DB Corp is India’s largest newspaper group. DB Corp publishes 62 editions in four languages and sells about 6 million newspaper copies per day. Beyond newspapers, DB Corp operates 29 radio stations, 13 portals and two mobile apps.

Like the media industry in general, DB Corp is having to adapt to readers’ increasing preference for accessing news content online – particularly on mobile devices. However, online advertising is yet to fill the gap left by the leakage of advertising revenues from print. Further disruption occurred when the Indian Government’s implemented a demonetization program in November 2016 that prompted a sharp surge in e-commerce transactions and online banking.

Facing a tsunami of change, DB Corp is developing and executing new strategies to engage consumers and build revenues. These plans include evolving from an IT-supported business to an IT enabled company, and finally to an IT-led business that complements its newspapers with online news and updates throughout the day. DB Corp is building e-commerce properties that leverage its print brands and is moving to increase advertising across its mobile services. Furthermore, the business is looking to capture information about readers and customers to tailor its publications and services more closely to their needs.

Expertise in managing large data volumes behind GCP selection

However, DB Corp’s on-premises infrastructure and traditional applications could not deliver the flexibility and agility needed to support the transition to real-time news delivery. In late 2015, DB Corp started evaluating public and private cloud services, including cloud-based application suites and platform as a service offerings. This process led the business to deploy G-Suite and start working with Google Cloud Platform (GCP). “We selected GCP due to Google’s experience in delivering cloud services, and because nobody else manages data volumes of the magnitude that they do,” says R D Bhatnagar, Chief Technology Officer, DB Corp. “We were also impressed by the fact GCP had a local team with the skills and expertise to educate us about how best to use its products.”

DB Corp is migrating its websites and key applications to GCP. The business is also upgrading its network to remove bandwidth restrictions that could impede the value provided by GCP services. The scale and scope of DB Corp’s G Suite and GCP projects has required the business to engage four partners and access technical expertise and support from Google itself. Technical and business experts from the platform as a service provider are providing monthly updates and training sessions with various groups within the organisation, including user communities and the board of directors.

The Google projects at DB Corp are driving a sharp increase in the speed, agility and performance of the business. “As a senior leader within the organisation, I see the key benefits of GCP and other technologies being lower cost; greater efficiency; and improved business continuity,” says Bhatnagar. “For example, the current data center team can be redeployed to other initiatives as the technical experts at GCP will be undertaking most of the management and maintenance tasks.

DB Corp is already making business and financial performance data available in real time from a single source, enabling business teams to make sound, consistent decisions about digital strategies and other key activities. These teams may also address issues or problems before they compromise the quality of content and services provided to consumers.

Deploying Chrome for Meetings across various offices has enabled teams to communicate and collaborate effectively in real time, breaking down geographic barriers, ensuring each member is on the same page and ensuring the business transformation proceeds smoothly. Sales teams are using Google Forms and Google Sheets to centralize and control tasks such as sales forecasting, reducing the time required to complete reports and updates from up to a week to two hours.

Furthermore, various teams are using calendars to improve organization and productivity. For example, editorial teams are using calendars to track Indian holidays and festivals and deliver relevant content to readers. Reporters are also using Google Cloud Speech API and Google Cloud Translation API services to capture and document interviews and source material for articles at accuracy rates of 95 percent for Hindi alone.

Every cloud system begins with high-quality hardware infrastructure. Sometimes, however, hardware breaks — and when it happens, our most important goal is to minimize the impact on our customers and their cloud workloads.

Memory errors are the most common type of hardware failure, and they’re also one of the most challenging in terms of their impact on production workloads and system reliability. That’s why we’re excited to share what Google Cloud has been doing to minimize the impact of memory errors. If your business runs SAP HANA in the cloud, this is an important innovation —  one that Google Cloud is proud to deliver to our customers.

Memory errors: A big problem with a long history

First things first: Memory errors are a high priority because they happen often. And when they happen, the disruption can have far-reaching effects on your customers and your business. 

In 2009, Google Cloud published the first major study on memory reliability. We found an average error rate of over 8% per year in DIMM modules installed in production systems. Given that each generation of DDR RAM packs more capacity into smaller packages, it’s safe to think that memory hardware has become less reliable since then.

Memory error impacts: They could be worse, but they’re far from good

What happens when a system detects a bad segment in a DIMM module? While data loss or corruption from memory errors is not common, some errors are correctable but some are not, potentially resulting in a critical system failure..  

Modern CPUs are equipped with error-correcting memory features and are very good at correcting simple errors with ECC (Error Correction Code). The challenge is that most of the software that runs on a host system — whether it’s a hypervisor, a virtual machine, an operating system, a database or an application — will crash instantly when it encounters an uncorrectable memory error. In a cloud environment, this kind of crash can take down cached data and even data saved to a local SSD. The crashed applications will recover, but the process means several minutes of downtime. The more data you have, the longer this process will take.

Sometimes, that’s merely an inconvenience. Other times, it’s a very big deal. A Google Cloud customer running business-critical SAP applications and an in-memory HANA database might measure downtime costs well over $10,000 per minute in lost revenue and other direct impacts. Many HANA databases load into terabytes of memory, and it can take an hour or longer to get everything restarted and back to normal after a crash. For SAP HANA, a fast recovery with up to 10 minutes of downtime requires a redundant replica provisioned all the time, doubling the cost.

And statistically speaking, when a HANA instance occupies almost all of the memory on a host system, it’s also the most likely application to stumble across a memory error. You can see why this would be a problem.

 The ‘victim neighbor’ VM challenge

There’s a final problem to consider when a memory error takes out production applications: what we call the “victim neighbor” issue.

In any cloud, a single physical host is a multi-tenant environment that might run dozens of VMs, potentially owned by dozens of different customers. A memory error won’t just crash the VM actually using the bad section, it will crash every VM running on the system. That’s a standard VM response to memory errors on a host system, and it will happen to any VM architecture available on the market today to avoid memory corruption. 

Overall, this “victim neighbor” effect accounts for more than 90% of the VMs that get knocked down by a memory error on a physical server. That’s a huge blast radius for such a common problem.

A practical solution to memory-error impacts

You can see why managing this problem is a big deal for Google Cloud. While we know that some failures are inevitable, we have developed another way to tackle the problem. Google Cloud already maintains some unique and valuable tools, such as Live Migration, that help our customers minimize unplanned downtime.When we integrate these tools with recent work that leverages error-handling capabilities built into CPUs (courtesy of Intel) and into certain applications (in particular, SAP HANA), we get a solution that dramatically reduces downtime and disruptions related to memory errors — in many cases, to the point where customers won’t even know there was a problem.

The Google Cloud solution: Memory poisoning recovery

At a big picture level, we refer to our solution as Memory Poisoning Recovery (MPR). It combines some existing Google Cloud capabilities, some new capabilities, and some important third-party capabilities at the CPU (Intel) and application (SAP HANA) levels. MPR can be broken down into two main processes:

Memory Error Isolation 

• Step 1: We hardened our VM technology to be more robust against memory errors. We intercept and analyse the memory error coming from the system. Then we flag the signaled region of a memory DIMM with an uncorrectable error as “poisoned”. 
• Step 2: Then we trigger processes to keep track of these “poisoned” regions and the VMs they affect so they can’t affect data integrity. 

Memory Error Recovery

• Step 3: Then we notify the Guest OS & the MCE-aware applications that a memory error has been recorded, in a manner that allows the applications to execute application relevant memory error handling.
• Step 4: At the same time we communicate with Google Cloud Live Migration to begin moving guest VMs off the affected host. This ensures customers are running on a healthy host which reduces the probability of more uncorrectable errors happening and avoids further downtime.

Below is a simple visual of how this all works:

How MPR makes life better for customers

Let’s look again at the different groups of Google Cloud customers involved in a memory error scenario and how we can help them achieve a happier ending after a crash — starting with the customer running the VM and application that actually triggered the memory error. 

Customer Group: MCE-Aware SAP HANA with Fast Restart enabled on a VM directly affected by a memory error.

Customer Group: Customers running other, non MCE Aware applications on a VM directly affected by a memory error

Next, our “victim neighbors” group probably won’t even know there was a problem with the host system. Google Cloud Live Migration will move them to a new host, instantly and automatically, and avoid the crash-and-restart scenario.

Customer Group: Customers running other, any application on a VM not directly affected by a memory error

Simple steps for taking advantage of MPR

Our MPR capabilities will be available on our Google Cloud memory-optimized Compute Engine second generation instances in Q4 of 2021. We’ll continue to roll out the capability during the months ahead to additional instances and look for new ways to work with applications that adopt a MCE Aware architecture.

Most customers in the “victim neighbor” category will not need to lift a finger to experience the benefits. By marrying our Live Migration feature to some awareness of those MCE signals, we ensure that it hears the alarm first and gets a critical head start on the migration process before issues begin with the guest VMs. Our customers land safely on a new host, and their applications keep running.

For our SAP customers running HANA, MPR is all about protecting against loss. Unplanned downtime for a HANA environment is incredibly expensive, the recovery process from a hard crash is extremely long, and the business disruptions can be truly damaging to the business. Thanks to MPR, all of that cost and worry can get compressed almost to nothing — with Fast Restart reducing what can be an hour or more of downtime to a matter of seconds.

But our SAP customers have to take a critical first step to claim these benefits. Fast Restart is a crucial piece of the MPR solution, and it is not enabled by default. Configuring your SAP HANA instance for Fast Restart involves changing a few configuration settings; the process is fast, easy, and doesn’t involve risk. 

Finally, if you’re not running your workloads — SAP or otherwise — on Google Cloud, consider the benefits of running on a cloud that mitigates a hardware reliability issue affecting businesses of every size and industry. And consider the value of tools like Live Migration that already help Google Cloud customers improve uptime and reduce risk.

Hardware failures happen, and they probably always will. But we’re proving how valuable it can be to avoid the bad things that usually happen when memory failures occur. Right now, only Google Cloud has a practical solution to this very difficult problem.    

Learn more about Fast Restart for SAP HANA, Live Migration and other key Google Cloud capabilities for your SAP environment.

Over the past several years, Google Cloud has made significant investments in our infrastructure product portfolio. We launched new Tau T2D VMs, which deliver 42% better price-performance vs. other leading cloud providers. We upgraded Cloud Storage to offer more flexibility to support customers’ enterprise and analytics workloads, with dual-region buckets and upcoming Turbo Replication. And we’ve delivered numerous improvements to our global network, including expansion to 29 cloud regions.

However, from conversations with customers, we’ve also learned we can do more to align our capabilities and pricing with their varied workloads. So, today, we are announcing we will adjust our infrastructure product and pricing structure to give customers more choice in how they pay for what they use alongside new, flexible SKUs with new product options and capabilities. These changes are designed to help ensure better product fit for our customers’ use cases across a wider array of workloads. They are also designed to better align with how other leading cloud providers charge for similar products, so customers can more easily compare services between leading cloud providers.

Some of these changes will provide new, lower-cost options and features for Google Cloud products. Other changes will raise prices on certain products. Ultimately, our goal is to provide more flexible pricing models and options for how customers are using our cloud services. Here’s an overview of what customers can expect:

Which services are changing? What new services are being introduced?

We are changing prices for some storage, compute, and networking products. The changes provide customers with new ways to optimize their spending based on workload type and size, or data portability needs, as well as reducing costs on some services. Specific changes include:

• Cloud Storage pricing changes for data mobility, including replication of data written to a dual- or multi-region storage bucket, and inter-region data access
• Introduction of a new lower-cost archive snapshot option for Persistent Disk (PD), so that compliance/archiving use cases are charged less than compute-intensive DevOps workloads
• New outbound data processing pricing for Cloud Load Balancing, in line with other leading cloud providers
• New pricing for Network Topology, which will include Performance Dashboard within Network Intelligence Center at no additional charge

Will customers’ bills increase? Decrease?

The impact of the pricing changes depends on customers’ use cases and usage. While some customers may see an increase in their bills, we’re also introducing new options for some services to better align with usage, which could lower some customers’ bills. In fact, many customers will be able to adapt their portfolios and usage to decrease costs. We’re working directly with customers to help them understand which changes may impact them.

When will the new prices go into effect?

Today, we sent customers a six-month notice on the price changes, which go into effect on October 1, 2022. Customers under existing commit contracts with a floating or fixed discount will not face any changes until renewal. Our goal is to help our customers manage any impact of these changes and allow time for them to adjust or modify their implementations.

What should customers do next?

There are a number of things customers can do to prepare for the changes:

• Read through the Mandatory Service Announcement (MSA) sent on March 14.
• Consider what actions, if any, they may want to take based on current storage, networking, and compute needs. Many of these changes may have simple choices associated with them.
• Consider using the Storage Transfer Service to select the right Cloud Storage bucket locations. Storage Transfer Service will be available free-of-cost for transfers within Cloud Storage, starting April 2 until the end of the year.

For those customers under contract, Google Cloud account representatives are available to discuss these changes. Please visit our pricing page and the links below for more details on our updates to storage, networking, and PD pricing, including information on how to modify your implementations if needed. If you do not have an account manager and still have questions please review our public FAQ, which will be updated regularly, as well as the resource links below.

Note: This pricing analysis is valid as of February 2022.

Resources:

• Cloud Storage Pricing Announcements 
• Load Balancing pricing Announcements
• Network Intelligence Center pricing Announcements
• PD Pricing Announcements
• Public FAQ