[Announcement] Public Preview of gRPC Observability on GCP

[Feng Li (李峰)]

We are pleased to announce the Public Preview of gRPC Observability on GCP

(User Guide, GCP blog.) This capability provides tools to collect and present telemetry data in the Google Cloud operations suite (e.g., Cloud Monitoring, Cloud Logging, and Cloud Trace) from gRPC workloads deployed on Google Cloud and elsewhere. User benefits include making it easier to troubleshoot and optimize gRPC workloads.

 

 

Details regarding the new capabilities follow:

 

• Logging: Logs for key RPC events share information to help developers understand the context of the events. This contextual information can include which gRPC service or method is being invoked, whether it’s sending metadata or payloads, the size of the corresponding data, and even the content of the metadata or payloads. These log entries are then presented in Cloud Logging with helpers to filter and customize the query to search related logs.

 

• Metrics: Several new metrics, including the round trip latency of RPCs, how many RPCs were started and finished during a specific period, and the number of bytes sent and received over the wire, are included with this capability. 

 

• Tracing: Often, gRPC developments fan out into multiple RPCs or requests that flow through distributed components. gRPC Observability uses distributed tracing to make it easier to analyze and troubleshoot complex systems by providing built-in support to start traces, generate spans, and propagate the tracing context.

 

These capabilities assist developers in establishing a holistic understanding of their gRPC-based microservices systems and enable them to diagnose problems, including:

 

• Which microservices suddenly process less QPS, and is there a pattern?

• Whether there’s a potential network issue for a particular microservice or locate problems in a specific cluster or even a particular node or pod?

 

Start Using gRPC Observability Today

To enable gRPC Observability, simply build your application with the observability plugin as explained in the user guide. It is currently supported in Java and Go languages and other languages (such as C++/Python) are coming soon.

 

What’s Next?

This public preview launch is the next step in the more extensive gRPC Observability journey, which aims to make GCP the preferred platform for gRPC-based applications. Future launches will include advanced observability features, richer data models, and support for more languages (e.g., C++, Python).

 

Get Connected with the gRPC team

Feel free to get in touch with the gRPC team.

Email: grpc-s...@google.com

Meeting: https://grpc.io/meet.