How to monitor HTTPS and TCP Load Balancers on GCP

google-cloud-platformgoogle-compute-enginegoogle-stackdriverload balancingmonitoring

we are using HTTPS and TCP Load balancers in the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and we want to monitor them (e.g. with Stackdriver).

For us, one main criteria seems to be the amount of healthy backend services (which also is an inidicator shown in the GCP Console as green or orange/red).

But unfortunately there is no such metric as backend_service.count.

Is there any other metric or way which could be used for that kind of monitoring?
Is it overall a good idea to monitor and alert based on the backend count? (maybe we miss something)

Best Answer

I think what you’re looking for is not from the load-balancer itself, instead you may use Stackdriver Groups.

You may use in different ways the groups in SD, for example if you have an instance group, you may use tags in the nodes part of the instance group and create a group with all the resources in your project that contain the tag that you defined in your instance template.

Also, you may specify the membership criteria with multiple options, for example you may use multiple criterias in order to group the number of nodes and also the region where they are or any other option in the Create Group form.

In the SD monitoring console you will be able to see the existing nodes that match the criteria(s) being part of the group and a graphic with the Running Resources.

Related Solutions

How to you redirect HTTP to HTTPS (GCP Load Balancing)

There is feature request submitted to Google product engineering team to support it on GCP HTTP(s) load-balancer. You can track this on Google public issue tracker.

There is a thread discussing the same and in NGINX server you can accomplish the same by adding following string into nginx configuration file like this:

if ($http_x_forwarded_proto = "http") { 
  return 301 https://$host$request_uri; 
}

You can check this thread as well which may help you.

Ssl – GCP HTTP Load Balancers With SSL Certificates for Multiple Websites

For your case study, you could use one network load balancer listening to ports 80 and 443 that would directly transfer request to the backend servers. The requests would be directly transferred for example to your Apache virtual hosts configured with SSL certificates for each of your websites.

If you are using an HTTPS load balancer, you are limited to 10 SSL certificates, that is to say ten websites.

What you may try to do is to have an HTTPS load balancer for each 10 domains,with SSL certificates installed, and all the load balancers would point to a backend instance group where all your websites are configured and SSL certificates installed.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

How to you redirect HTTP to HTTPS (GCP Load Balancing)

Ssl – GCP HTTP Load Balancers With SSL Certificates for Multiple Websites

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