Customers need scale and flexibility from their cloud and this extends into supporting services such as monitoring and logging. Google Cloud’s Monitoring and Logging observability services are built on the same platforms used by all of Google that handle over 16 million metrics queries per second, 2.5 exabytes of logs per month, and over 14 quadrillion metric points on disk, as of 2020. However, you let us know through consistent feedback that the previous construct of Workspaces for Cloud Monitoring was not providing the flexibility needed for your larger scale projects.

Cloud Operation’s New Approach to Multi-Project Monitoring

We’re happy to announce a new model for multi-project monitoring, which replaces the concept of Workspaces. This overhaul is geared toward maximizing the flexibility you have to manage your monitoring environments by introducing Metrics Scopes. Starting today you can associate your Google Cloud projects with multiple Metrics Scopes! Like Workspaces, Metrics Scopes will still be used to store all of the configuration content for dashboards, alerting policies, uptime checks, notification channels, and group definitions. However there is no limit to the number of Metrics Scopes to which you can associate a project. Prior to this change, a project could only be scoped with a single Workspace. Now, there are virtually unlimited possibilities for how you can set up multi-project monitoring. This unlocks a large variety of options, from more granular permissions to mission-focused configurations. At its most simple implementation though: operators/SREs can now create org-wide Metrics Scopes with monitoring configurations focused on infrastructure health. And developers can leverage Metrics Scopes built on a subset of their organization’s projects that allow them to focus on their application’s performance.

How it works

• When you have a collection of projects, Metrics Scopes enable you to view each project’s metrics in isolation as well as in combination with metrics stored by other projects. 
• The Metrics Scope is hosted by a scoping project. This scoping project is the Cloud project that is selected in the Cloud Console project picker.

Example

• In this example, Project-SRE is the name of a scoping project to monitor your fleet. You added two developer teams’ projects: Project-Dev-1 and Project-Dev-2, to Project-SRE’s Metrics Scope. If you select Project-SRE with the Cloud Console project picker and then go to the Monitoring page, you view the metrics for all three projects: 

• If you select Project-Dev-1 with the Cloud Console project picker and then go to the Monitoring page, you view the Metrics Scope for Project-Dev-1 and you can only see the metrics for that project:

What else is new?

• Metrics Scopes can now monitor up to 375 projects (up from 100).
• New projects automatically start working in Cloud Monitoring without the previous 60-second Workspace creation process.
• If you want to monitor more than one project simply add it to your Metrics Scope:

Navigation

• Mentioned earlier, the Project Picker in the Cloud Console can be used to navigate between Metrics Scopes in Cloud Monitoring:

• This is now consistent with many other services across Google Cloud. Specifically, you can see how the project picker stays consistent when navigating from Cloud Monitoring to Cloud Logging:

• Additionally, to make your navigation between Metrics Scopes easy we’ve added the new Metrics Scope Tab and Panel in the UI:

Coming Soon

• The Metrics Scope API is coming within the next quarter! This API will enable you to programmatically manage your monitoring configurations and Metrics Scopes.

Current Workspaces users

If you are already using Workspaces in Cloud Monitoring you may have noticed that they converted to Metrics Scopes weeks ago. There is no additional action required and you can start taking advantage of the additional features of Metrics Scopes today.

Get Started

Companies that are digitally native or in the process of digital transformation have placed an increased operational role on developers and this often creates overlapping sets of responsibilities with Operations and SRE teams. Now multiple developer teams can focus on optimizing the performance of their applications while operators can take a fleet-wide view when maintaining and improving the performance of all of the infrastructure under their purview.For information on configuring a Metrics Scope to include metrics for multiple projects, see Viewing metrics for multiple projects.

Editor’s note: Meet Gareth Walkom, an entrepreneur dedicated to helping others with speech disorders.

Turning life experience into innovation

Did you know that 3% of Americans have a speech disorder, while 1% of the world’s population have a stutter? Just getting what they need in everyday interactions can be stressful, which intensifies when the stakes are raised during job interviews, presentations, public speaking, and other activities. As a result, some people with speech disorders may avoid conversations and relationships, and risk being denied jobs because of a difference in how they speak.

As a person who stutters, I know firsthand the ableism that people with a speech disorder can encounter in wanting to use their voice in a judgemental world: the frustration of sometimes not being able to say exactly what you want to say and therefore speaking less in speaking situations. And the educational and career opportunities are lost when doors remain closed to us, especially when employers advertise their jobs as requiring someone who speaks the language ‘fluently’.

While researchers still don’t definitively know what causes stuttering, emerging technologies are giving us new and promising pathways for improving the quality of life of people with speech disorders. 

That’s why after years of researching and testing potential therapeutic uses of virtual reality, and with the support of the Google for Startups Cloud Program, I founded withVR on International Stuttering Awareness Day (October 22) in 2020. The mission of withVR is to prepare people with speech disorders for real-life speaking situations by utilizing the power of virtual reality. 

Working through it

One of the difficulties in adapting to any disability is the opportunity to work through it in a safe and nonjudgmental environment. withVR provides a virtual space for individuals, in collaboration with their speech therapists, to practice real-world speaking scenarios in safe, controlled environments. 

Imagine being able to raise your hand in class and give your opinion without hesitation, ordering the meal you want rather than something that’s easier to say, or sit across the table from an avatar of an employer and explain why you are the right person for your dream job. Then further customize the speaking situation and its surroundings to challenge yourself and be ready for anything. That’s what withVR offers individuals and their speech therapists.

Making VR come to life

To bring the withVR vision to life, we are developing applications using the Unity game engine on Google Cloud with integrated Firebase services including authentication, web hosting, storage, and database. It’s a powerful combination that’s enabled us to build industrial-strength applications that we’ve rapidly deployed on a global basis. Today we are already collaborating with 80+ labs, clinics, and hospitals in more than 20 different countries worldwide.

These organizations help us to test and refine a virtual reality application to support people in achieving their speech goals and build comfort through immersive VR experiences using easily available viewers like Google Cardboard. 

The application works in conjunction with a web app through which speech therapists configure customized VR scenarios for their patients to use. As no real-life speaking situation is ever exactly the same, customization of VR scenarios is vital. They can construct different scenes, create and script avatars, and through the Google Text-to-Speech API can even choose from hundreds of different voices in a variety of languages. This gives them the flexibility to create many unique speaking situations for their clients no matter where they are in the world.

Progress from the practice sessions is presented through a dashboard that provides therapists with a tool to monitor their clients’ progress and provide feedback and encouragement.

No shortage of support

My founder’s journey has been supported by many passionate people. The Google for Startups Cloud Program has been instrumental in helping us come so far in the first year, and we’ve only scratched the surface of what’s possible. There are many capabilities in Firebase and Google Cloud that we have yet to explore, and through the startup program I now have a Google Mentor who can help guide that exploration. 

We also joined the 2Gether-International (2GI) Tech Cohort, which is supported by Google for Startups and is built for and run by entrepreneurs with disabilities. At the end of the 10-week cohort, we finished with a pitch competition, where I was one of six selected founders to pitch in just three minutes. I was very fortunate to win the Best Overall Pitch Award, gaining 10,000 USD in seed funding. This award not only highlights the potential of withVR, but also showcases that anyone can pitch their idea in a short amount of time no matter their difference. 

Working with 2GI also gave me the opportunity to collaborate and learn from other founders who have disabilities. It’s a safe space where I don’t have to explain my everyday challenges and can focus on the all-important task of advancing the vision of withVR, while seeing how others use technology in their domain. 

Building on a strong foundation

I’m amazed to look back and see what we’ve accomplished in just one year and humbled by the thousands of lives we’ve touched. Every day we receive valuable real-life feedback from people in the field—both clinicians and those with speech differences who benefit from VR therapy. That knowledge tells us that we are heading in the right direction and opening our eyes to new possibilities for where to take withVR. And inspiring us to keep moving ahead.

If you’d like to participate in testing or if you are speech therapist or researcher, please feel free to reach out to us. We’d love to show you how you can contribute to a world where anyone with a speech disorder can truly use their voice in any situation. If you’d like to take part, contact us at hello@withvr.app.

If you want to learn more about how Google Cloud can help your startup, visit our page here to get more information about our program, and sign up for our communications to get a look at our community activities, digital events, special offers, and more.

We’ve made several updates to Google Cloud VMware Engine in recent weeks—today’s post provides a recap of our latest milestones. Google Cloud VMware Engine delivers an enterprise-grade VMware stack running natively in Google Cloud. This cloud service is one of the fastest paths to the cloud for VMware workloads without making changes to existing applications or operating models across a variety of use-cases. These include rapid data center exit, application lift and shift, disaster recovery, virtual desktop infrastructure, or modernization at your own pace.

In fact, Mitel, a global provider of unified communications-as-a-service to 70 million business users across 100 countries, migrated 1,000 VMware instances to Google Cloud VMware Engine in less than 90 days and improved its monthly operational output four times. 

In our last update, we focused on several innovative capabilities around networking, reach, and scale. Let us take a look at the highlights we released since our last installment.

Fast provisioning of a dedicated, intrinsically secure VMware private cloud

With Google Cloud VMware Engine, you can spin up a VMware private cloud in about 30 minutes. You can also scale your VMware-based infrastructure on-demand with dedicated hosts located in secure Google data centers. Let us look at what’s new:

Autoscale: The ability to elastically and programmatically manage infrastructure resources to align with business needs or what is called “right-sizing” is a core capability of an IaaS platform. With autoscale, Google Cloud VMware Engine users can leverage policy-driven automation to scale the nodes needed to meet the compute demands of the VMware infrastructure. 

Autoscale:

• Addresses seasonal spikes in demand, gradual increases of utilization, or new projects being onboarded or expanded due to disaster recovery events. 
• Analyzes the CPU, memory, and storage utilization to give you the controls to scale Google Cloud VMware Engine nodes up or down. 
• Ensures that storage consumption does not exceed the recommended limits for maintaining the Google Cloud VMware Engine service-level agreement. 
• Reduces overhead on IT teams by automating capacity monitoring and enabling sufficient availability of resources based on thresholds. Note that safeguards for maintaining minimum capacity and maximum capacity can be configured to ensure there are boundaries to the automation.

Learn how to set up Autoscale.

Mumbai region availability 

Google Cloud VMware Engine is now available in the Mumbai region. This brings the availability of the service to 12 regions globally, enabling our multi-national and regional customers to leverage a VMware-compatible infrastructure-as-a-service platform on Google Cloud. For more details, please read the press release.

Enterprise-grade infrastructure

With 99.99% availability for a cluster in a single zone, fully dedicated 100 Gbps east-west networking with no oversubscription, and all nonvolatile memory express storage, Google Cloud VMware Engine provides the highest performance required for the most demanding workloads. Let us look at what’s new:

Preview – Google Cloud KMS integration: You already have the ability to bring your own keys to encrypt your vSAN datastores. With this new capability, organizations that want to eliminate the overhead of managing external key providers can leverage a Google managed key provider, using Cloud KMS. This brings increased flexibility in securing workloads and data by enabling vSAN encryption by default for newly instantiated VMware Private Clouds. This feature is currently in Preview. 

HIPAA compliance: Since April, Google Cloud VMware Engine is Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) compliant. This opens the service up to healthcare organizations, that can now migrate and run their HIPAA-compliant VMware workloads in a fully compatible VMware Cloud Verified stack running natively in Google Cloud with Google Cloud VMware Engine, without changes or re-architecture to tools, processes, or applications. Read more in this blog.

NSX-T support for Active Directory: With NSX-T support for Active Directory, you can now leverage your on-premises Active Directory as one of the lightweight directory access protocol identity sources for user authentication into NSX-T manager. This extends the theme of being able to leverage your on-premises tools with Google Cloud VMware Engine. For more information, read the documentation on how to set up identity sources.

vSAN TRIM/UNMAP support: For space-efficiency, vSAN allows creating thin-provisioned disks that grow gradually as they are filled with data. However, files that are deleted within the guest operating system (OS) do not result in vSAN freeing up space allocated. To increase space efficiency, guest OS file systems have the ability to reclaim capacity that is no longer used, using TRIM/UNMAP commands. vSAN is fully aware of these commands that are sent from the guest OS and enables reclamation of previously allocated storage as free space. We have enabled TRIM/UNMAP for vSan by default in Google Cloud VMware Engine.

Simplicity in experience and operations

With Google Cloud VMware Engine, you only need to worry about your workloads—not patching, upgrading, and updating the solution layer, for fewer interoperability issues and infrastructure maintenance. IIn addition, we have pre-built service accounts to enable your third-party VMware-supported tools and solutions to work seamlessly in VMware Engine. Access to Google services privately over local connections is also natively supported, enabling enrichment of existing applications and modernization over time. Finally, this service brings the power of Google Cloud Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) design by natively providing multi-VPC, multi-region networking that’s unique. Let’s look at what’s new:

Dashboards for Day 2 operations: To speed up cloud transformation and enable efficiency, Google Cloud VMware Engine administrators can take advantage of Cloud Operations dashboards for the solution. In addition, administrators can create custom policies through cloud alerting and enable notifications via channels of their choice (SMS, email, Slack, and more). For more details on how to set up cloud monitoring, please refer to Setting up Cloud Monitoring. 

For the latest updates, bookmark Google Cloud VMware Engine release notes.

^{Thanks to Manish Lohani, Product Management, Google Cloud; Nargis Sakhibova, Product Management, Google Cloud; and Wade Holmes, Solutions Management, Google Cloud; for their contributions to this blog post.}