More and more startups are choosing to build their business on Google Cloud, and if yours is one of them — welcome! And even though Google Cloud is easy to use, there’s still a lot to learn, starting with how to create and activate your account, and how to create projects, folders, and organizations as part of Google Cloud’s resource hierarchy. If you prefer, you can also watch our video on how to get started with Google Cloud.

Once you’ve mastered those concepts, you’re ready to learn how to get the most out of your investment in Google Cloud. In this blog, we’ll show you how to manage and monitor your cloud resources with Google Cloud’s  operations suite, administer your billing with Cloud Billing, and improve the support you receive with Google Cloud Customer Care. Whether you’re new to Google Cloud or an experienced user, these services will help improve your experience. 

Let’s get started!

Improve the performance and reliability of your applications with the operations suite

Sometimes you want to check how your deployment is behaving, or if there is something happening with your server, database, or application that is affecting your customers. With so many tools to check, finding and solving the issue can become overwhelming very quickly. This is where Google Cloud’s operations suite comes in. 

This suite of products for integrated monitoring, logging, and tracing managed services for applications and systems running on Google Cloud and beyond. It can help you visualize and monitor incidents with dashboards and Metrics Explorer, manage and analyze log data in real-time all in one place with Cloud Logging, visualize metrics at scale with Cloud Monitoring, manage latency with Cloud Trace, and perform performance and cost management with Cloud Profiler.

Learn more about the operations suite in the video below:

Manage budgets and alerts with Cloud Billing

Google Cloud billing management is easier than you might think. Google Cloud charges for compute resources monthly on a consumption basis, which is different from the traditional upfront purchase model. With the right tools and resources, you can more easily manage your costs and optimize your use of Google Cloud resources.

One of the most important things to do is to set up billing and alerts. This will help you avoid unexpected charges and ensure that you are only paying for the resources you use. You can also use budgets and alerts to track your costs and help ensure that you are staying within your budget.

You can also view your costs through console billing reports, monthly invoices or build customized dashboards on BigQuery, Google Data Studio, or a BI tool of your preference. This allows you to see where your costs come from and identify areas where you can save money. You can also use cost management to optimize your use of Google Cloud resources and get the most out of your investment.

Finally, Google Cloud offers a variety of discounts and optimization options. These can help you save money on your overall costs. For example, you can get a discount if you commit to using Google Cloud for a certain period of time. You can also save money by using preemptible VMs, which are VMs that are available at a lower price but can be terminated at any time.

Google Cloud Customer Care

To meet customer needs and deliver a better experience, we’ve reenvisioned our Customer Care portfolio, a scalable set of offerings built with your needs at the center, so you can simplify and streamline your support experience. 

Choose from the core offerings:

• Basic – the support tier you receive when you sign up on Google Cloud. You can use this at no cost but support is offered for billing issues only.
• Standard – simple, flexible way to ensure that your workloads run smoothly on Google Cloud. Standard enables you to receive technical help from Google experts with a four hour response time and 8 hours response time during 5 days a week availability.
• Enhanced – rapid response times and additional services to boost your productivity and help you run in Google Cloud efficiently. There is both case and phone support for technical issues, with a one-hour response time. There is 24/5 availability overall with 24/7 for critical issues. You can also have add-ons or value-add services like Technical Account Adviser Service and Event management.
• Premium – the highest value support offering, supplying incredibly fast response times, a named Technical Account Manager, Customer Aware support and additional services. There is case and phone support for technical issues and also third-party technology support, with a 15-minute response time and a 24/5 availability overall with 24/7 for critical issues.

Watch the video to find out how to purchase support, create support cases and learn more about support.

Supercharge your growth with the Google for Startups Cloud Program

Growing a startup requires technology that can keep up with and enhance your ideas. The Google for Startups Cloud Program provides the tech you need to help develop better software and deliver innovative experiences with confidence. At the same time, you’ll help boost your team’s capabilities with expert cloud guidance, Google Cloud credits, training opportunities, and more.

The program has two tiers:

• Start: for pre-seed startups that have not yet received equity funding. Get up to $2,000 USD in Google Cloud credit that’s valid for two years toward Google Cloud services and even toward a Cloud Customer Care plan with unlimited access to technical support, networking opportunities with the global Google Cloud Startup Community, and more.
• Scale: for seed to series A startups with verified equity funding. Get Google Cloud and Firebase costs covered up to $100,000 USD a year for your first two years, unlimited access to technical support when credits are applied to a Cloud Customer Care plan, partnerships with Google Cloud Startup Customer Engineers and a dedicated Startup Success Manager, networking opportunities with the global Google Cloud Startup Community, co-marketing for select startups, and more. 

Once enrolled, Google startup experts will recommend Google products and services that can help your startup grow in the cloud. Learn more about the Google for Startups program, eligibility criteria, credit usage and migration incentives in the our Startup Programs video linked down below.

That’s a wrap!

Let’s recap: The operations suite includes tools to monitor incidents, analyze log data in real-time, manage latency, and more. Cloud Billing offers billing management tools and resources to help you save costs and make the most of your resources. If you need help, Cloud Customer Care services are available to streamline your support experience. Also, if you’re a startup, don’t forget to check the Google for Startups Cloud Program!

The Google Cloud Technical Guides for Startups series has many detailed videos and handbooks to support you on all steps of your startup growth journey. Check out our full playlist on the Google Cloud Tech channel and website. Don’t forget to subscribe to stay up to date.

See you in the cloud!

FM Logistic provides its international customers with complete logistics solutions that cover everything from warehousing and handling, to transport and distribution, co-packing and co-manufacturing, and supply chain optimization. Operating in 14 countries including France, Russia, Poland, India, Vietnam, Brazil, and China, FM Logistic supports its clients by offering specialized services across a number of markets including consumer goods, retail, cosmetics, and health.

“We are in the process of transforming all our tools and integrating new solutions to be able to work faster and more efficiently. Two main IT priorities are mobility and openness, in terms of working from anywhere and being able to interact with other information systems.”

– Communication Manager, FM Logistic

As a business that has existed since 1967 and in 2018 achieved a turnover of €1.178 billion with 9.5% annual growth, FM Logistic is always looking to help secure the company’s position within an evolving sector. To better serve its customers, FM Logistic decided to launch an innovation project in 2017 to transform the internal digital tools of the company and replace its intranet, email, and productivity software. The company looked for an integrated solution that would enable more collaborative ways of working and bring its international operations closer together. The company found that implementing G Suite and LumApps social intranet was the perfect combination.

“We are in the process of transforming all our tools and integrating new solutions to be able to work faster and more efficiently,” says the Communication Manager at FM Logistic. “Two main IT priorities are mobility and openness, in terms of working from anywhere and being able to interact with other information systems.”

A global transformation

For large international companies with global operations, implementing a single integrated solution to enable collaboration across regions while respecting regional variations can be a real challenge.

“We have 26,000 employees spread across a broad geography, with a variation in cultures and technological maturity. There was an aspiration to work in collaboration, but the necessary tools were not in place,” says FM Logistic’s Communication Manager. FM Logistic looked for a solution to enable new, more collaborative work practices, which were flexible in terms of usage and that, most importantly, would work as part of an integrated solution.

To do that, FM Logistic worked with Google Partner Devoteam G Cloud to implement G Suite alongside the LumApps intranet portal. It took six months to complete the migration of 7,000 accounts, with employees accessing the Business or Basic G Suite edition according to their needs. “Before, with our physical infrastructure we found ourselves buying additional hard drives as we ran out of storage,” says the Technical Project Manager at FM Logistic. “That’s no longer a problem, and we can tailor access depending on whether or not employees need unlimited storage .”

“It’s a real advantage to be able to access your account from any device and work from anywhere. Hangouts Meet has been really transformational in that respect: it has reduced the need for travel significantly, even in the few months we’ve been using it so far.”

– Communication Manager, FM Logistic

“We followed Google’s G Suite migration advice and had early adopter ambassadors in every country. By the time we got around to the final country, very little input was needed as they were ready to go!” says the Technical Project Manager. “Many of them were already familiar with the product, so it was very intuitive. Our feedback surveys gave a satisfaction rating of almost 4.5 out of 5 in relation to the transition. We also had significant executive support, with two members of the executive committee on the steering board. That really helped the project to move quickly.”

As a result, employees were quick to understand the benefits of the new system. “It’s a real advantage to be able to access your account from any device and work from anywhere. That was clear from the start,” says the Communication Manager. “Hangouts Meet has been really transformational in that respect: it has reduced the need for travel significantly, even in the few months we’ve been using it so far.”

LumApps: a fully-integrated enterprise hub

One of FM Logistic’s main reasons for choosing G Suite was the seamless integration with LumApps’ intranet portal. LumApps adds value to G Suite, thereby boosting and sustaining employee adoption. FM Logistic chose LumApps to create a hub for its enterprise, where everything is centralized from internal communications to business apps.

“We didn’t want a patchwork of solutions, we needed a platform that worked as an integral whole,” says the Technical Project Manager. “With LumApps, employees access the intranet using their Google authentication and can access all their G Suite tools through the intranet. Moreover, LumApps is Google native, so the integration is seamless and we know that it will evolve to accommodate any changes that might take place.”

“The main advantages we see are communication and knowledge sharing,” says the Communication Manager. “With LumApps, all 26,000 of our employees are now able to access the portal in their own language and access local news.”

For the next step, FM Logistic is considering integrating social communities so that employees can express themselves and be more engaged in the corporate culture.

Supporting digital maturity

Thanks to Drive, employees can now work from wherever they are, and are able to work more efficiently and more collaboratively. “From an administrative point of view, users can benefit from automatic updates, so there is less pressure on the IT department,” says the Technical Project Manager. “And we’re seeing many innovative uses of the tools to work in more efficient ways: many services have gone paperless with Forms, so less time is wasted; commercial agents are using Drive to work together on tenders simultaneously; and with Sheets, tasks are automatically sent from the team manager’s file to employee’s Calendar.”

“G Suite and LumApps are the first step of our digital transformation, in terms of collaboration and moving into the cloud. We have real confidence in our partners LumApps and Google, and we’re investing in those relationships for the long-term benefit of the company.”

– Communication Manager, FM Logistic

Now, FM Logistic wants to further support its employees in exploring all the tools G Suite has to offer. “We are embarking on a second phase to give our employees the skills they need for advanced uses of Docs, Sheets, and Forms,” says the Communication Manager. “It’s a learning curve, but it’s key to our goal of transforming our everyday processes.”

“G Suite and LumApps are the first step of our digital transformation, in terms of collaboration and moving into the cloud. We have real confidence in our partners LumApps and Google, and we’re investing in those relationships for the long-term benefit of the company.”

In the United Kingdom, the popularity of online grocery shopping is expected to surge from about 6% of the market today to 9% by 2021, according to market research firm Mintel. One of the pioneers of online-only grocery retailing is Ocado, based in Hatfield, Hertfordshire in the U.K. Since starting commercial deliveries in 2002, the company has grown to 600,000 active customers, 260,000 weekly orders, and £1.39 billion in annual revenue.

Ocado takes supermarket trips out of the equation by enabling shoppers to purchase items online through its convenient web and mobile applications. Items are then picked and packed in automated warehouses and shipped directly to customers in a one-hour time slot of their choosing. Ocado’s delivery punctuality is 95%, order accuracy is 99%, and its service footprint now reaches more than 70% of the U.K. population.

“Google Cloud Platform gives us the flexibility and performance to tackle the large and complex data challenges unique to our business.”

—Paul Clarke, Chief Technology Officer, Ocado

The company achieved its success by building in-house almost all the technology and automation that powers its end-to-end e-commerce, fulfillment, and logistics platform. Ocado also developed a new platform, the Ocado Smart Platform (OSP), which offers large brick-and-mortar grocery retailers around the world access to a best-in-class solution for online grocery.

Democratizing machine learning

The shopping journey for online grocery retailing differs significantly from other e-businesses. Customers often buy dozens of products at once, a single household may have multiple buyers using multiple devices, and product shelf life may only be a couple of days.

“We often say that having built an end-to-end platform that can do online grocery scalably and profitably, we can do other forms of online retail; but the reverse does not necessarily follow,” says Paul Clarke, Chief Technology Officer at Ocado. “Google Cloud Platform gives us the flexibility and performance to tackle the large and complex data challenges unique to our business.”

The Ocado business model takes advantage of consumers’ shifting preferences and the links between digital technology and shopping experiences.

“Google Cloud Machine Learning Engine gives us the agility we need. Our developers were able to try out TensorFlow and see firsthand the benefits of machine learning in the cloud.”

—Paul Clarke, Chief Technology Officer, Ocado

The company has been building machine learning into its systems for over five years. Until recently, Ocado machine learning applications required specialist data scientists, typically with PhDs in machine learning, who would build these solutions from the ground up. It also required the specialist who set up the system and costly on-premises infrastructure to train and run these systems.

However, working with Google as a private alpha testing site for Google Cloud Machine Learning Engine accelerated its adoption of artificial intelligence (AI).

“We’ve been talking about how the cloud could democratize AI for some time,” says Paul. “Google Cloud Machine Learning Engine gives us the agility we need. Our developers were able to try out TensorFlow and see firsthand the benefits of machine learning in the cloud.”

TensorFlow is an open source software library for machine learning developed by the Google Brain team. Ocado developers, engineers, and data scientists now use TensorFlow for many of their machine learning projects. They deploy the models they build on Google Cloud Machine Learning Engine, which lets them train models faster across servers, desktop computers, and mobile devices through a single application program interface (API). Additionally, Google Cloud Machine Learning Engine integrates easily with the other Google Cloud Platform products used widely at Ocado.

What do customers really want?

One of the first TensorFlow models Ocado created was a machine learning algorithm that tags and categorizes customer emails and then prioritizes them for response.

The contact center receives thousands of emails each day and Ocado wanted to automate determining which ones needed to be answered immediately and which ones could wait.

For example, a first-time customer expressing their delight in using Ocado doesn’t need to be responded to with the same urgency as a customer who is missing an item from their order or who won’t be home to receive the delivery.

“Enabling agents to respond without having to sort through less-urgent emails improves Ocado’s responsiveness and customer service.”

—James Donkin, General Manager, Ocado

“We get a lot of emails from customers saying, ‘Our service was great,’ or ‘The driver was very courteous,'” says James Donkin, General Manager, Ocado. “But when issues like weather or road conditions potentially affect delivery, we often get surges of urgent questions. Enabling agents to respond without having to sort through less-urgent emails improves Ocado’s responsiveness and customer service.”

Using Google Cloud Machine Learning Engine, TensorFlow, and a large data set culled from several years’ worth of manually categorized customer emails, Ocado experimented on which kind of neural network architecture would best prioritize emails. After testing its models, Ocado implemented the highest-performing one and has been able to respond to urgent messages four times faster. The company also discovered that 7% of its emails don’t require a response at all, which means call center representatives now have more time to devote to higher priority messages.

“Without Google Cloud Machine Learning Engine, it would have been a lot harder to succeed on a project like email classification,” says Roland Plaszowski, who has recently managed several big data projects and initiatives at Ocado.

“Even if we invested significantly in infrastructure, it would be difficult to manage because of the computational intensity. It’s challenging and expensive to run machine learning projects at the same time without infrastructure that you can scale easily.”

Ocado also uses machine learning to predict customer behavior and improve experiences. By analyzing order data, Ocado makes shopping as frictionless as possible. For example, the ordering system can pre-populate customers’ shopping carts with items they are most likely to purchase, remind customers about items they may have forgotten, and notify them of multi-buy offers they haven’t completed, for example, only buying one of a buy one, get one free offer. Based on machine learning from previous purchase data, the Ocado system can also offer new products that are likely to delight customers.

“You will regularly see items that are more personally relevant to you instead of items that are being promoted more generally,” says James. “I’m a vegetarian, so I’m offered specials for vegetarian products that I normally buy and new ones that I’ve never bought. I’m also less likely to see things that I’m not interested in.”

Machines and machine learning

Within the Internet of Things (IoT), Ocado is looking to enhance its warehouse robots with machine learning. An integral part of the OSP, thousands of robots continually stream data into Google Cloud Storage and Google BigQuery.

Ocado data scientists apply machine learning to create a type of swarm intelligence that enables warehouse robots to work cooperatively to achieve a common goal. Projects include modules to search robot telemetry data, such as whether a battery pack is operating within standard tolerances or whether firmware has been successfully loaded, and use it to optimize maintenance schedules or detect patterns in wear and tear.

“Another challenge we’re looking at is how to embed machine learning directly into robots so they become smarter in terms of self-testing, exception handling, and error recovery,” says Paul. “This is a challenging combination of IoT, data analytics, and machine learning that we believe Google BigQuery and Google Cloud Machine Learning are particularly well suited to helping Ocado achieve.”

Scaling for new business

Scalability is also a major reason behind some of Ocado’s cloud initiatives, including the migration of all its on-premises data to the cloud. Ocado wanted to improve customer experiences, empower business teams with greater insight, and reduce IT overhead, so it consolidated onto Google Cloud Platform.

“The old databases just weren’t fast enough,” says Paul. “We needed a solution that could scale with the amount of data we generate and how we use it. Google Cloud Storage and Google BigQuery now provide the backbone, from a data point of view, for the Ocado Smart Platform.”

Ocado estimates its business, product, and transaction data is approaching two petabytes. Combining customer and supply chain data helps both internal Ocado operations and the company’s ambitions to commercialize OSP.

“When compared with other options for expansion internationally, selling OSP as a managed service lets us turn companies that could have been competitors into customers,” says Paul. “We want to build OSP once and then turn it on for multiple business-to-business customers.”

Each time Ocado adds a new hosting customer to OSP, it will launch a customized instance to fit that customer’s requirements. The capacity and performance of each new OSP instance must be able to scale quickly as the backend platform for established retailers with large numbers of products, customers, and transactions.

Ocado’s first OSP customer, Morrisons, is already benefiting from this first-of-a kind solution. Morrisons is one of the UK’s four largest supermarkets and uses OSP to power its online retail business. Using Google Cloud Platform, Ocado has stored, processed, and analyzed terabytes of Morrisons’ data using a dedicated data lake and Google BigQuery.

In addition to using Google Cloud Platform for OSP, Ocado also adopted it for its own online grocery retail business operation. Ocado originally used the Apache Spark and Apache Hadoop open-source frameworks on Google Compute Engine for its data platform. Moving to Google BigQuery frees Ocado business analysts from the complex query setup and workflows associated with Spark and Hadoop. Plus, it lets Ocado share data analytics with suppliers and partners.

Google BigQuery is well integrated with TensorFlow on Google Cloud Machine Learning Engine and Google Cloud Dataproc, the Apache Spark and Apache Hadoop service that lets Ocado use open source data tools for batch processing, querying, streaming, and machine learning. Google Cloud Dataflow and Google Cloud Dataproc handle cluster management, and provide an easy-to-use framework so developers can spend less time and money on administration and more time on delivering valuable business features.

Switching from Hadoop to Google BigQuery revealed a series of cost and performance improvements. For example, Ocado no longer needed to decide how many instances to bring up in a cluster or wait for the instances to spin up. Google handled everything.

“We simply ran our queries and paid for the resources that we use,” adds Roland. “One big win with Google BigQuery is we don’t have to do maintenance. Best of all, we saw Google BigQuery outperform our Hadoop cluster by over 80 times on our largest dataset, and for only two-thirds the cost.”

Quanta Services is the leading specialty contractor with the largest and highly-skilled trained workforce in North America. It provides fully-integrated solutions for the electric power

pipeline industrial and telecommunications industries the company’s geographic footprint which includes North America Latin America and Australia.

It’s network of companies ensures world-class execution with local delivery and has over 40,000 employees.

“The exciting thing about Backstory is it allows us to land massive amounts of data from all of our different security tools and then Chronicle worries about how to correlate and aggregate this information for us. We can then focus on the highest priority threats.”

Richard Breaux, Manager Security Operations Quanta Services

Because Quanta Services’ customers provide energy and telecommunications to their customers, they have world-class cybersecurity requirements.

“We must ensure that Quanta leads the industry given the fact that our business is building the core infrastructure that powers people’s lives. It’s crucial that we meet their cybersecurity requirements,” says James Stinson, VP-IT, Quanta Services.

To support this goal Quanta implemented a number of security tools that generate terabytes of security telemetry. Over time, however, these systems generated an information overload for the company’s limited pool of qualified security resources.

“Our logging tools also couldn’t keep up with the rapidly growing information. With limited resources we need to focus our security analysts time on high quality work instead of digging through mountains of data,” says Stinson.

They achieve this by implementing Backstory and Chronicle, which is on Google Cloud.

“The exciting thing about Backstory is it allows us to land massive amounts of data from all of our different security tools and then Chronicle worries about how to correlate and aggregate this information for us. We can then focus on the highest priority threats,” says Richard Breaux, Manager Security Operations Quanta Services.

As a result, the company’s security  team spends less time getting to the core information they need to address these incidents.

“What used to take us 15 minutes or more, we can now accomplish in seconds,” says Breaux.