Google is giving enterprises more tools to troubleshoot persnickety workloads and apps

Google has added a service enabling users of its cloud platform to analyse data logs from both Compute Engine and App Engine, which the company said would help users optimise management operators.

Google already offers a cloud monitoring tools that gives enterprises visibility into networking and compute resources associated with their instances (the company acquired these capabilities from Stackdriver last year), but much more can be gleaned from the massive number of logs that workloads generate – particularly when investigating consistent service errors.

That’s where the cloud logging service comes into play, enabling users of Google’s cloud services to view, analyse and export log data in real time.

“Businesses generate a staggering amount of log data that contains rich information on systems, applications, user requests, and administrative actions. When managed effectively, this treasure trove of data can help you investigate and debug system issues, gain operational and business insights and meet security and compliance needs,” explained Deepak Tiwari, product manager at Google in a recent blog post.

“But log management is challenging. You need to manage very high volumes of streaming data, provision resources to handle peak loads, scale fast and efficiently and have the capability to analyse data in real-time,” he said.

A number of Google’s rivals (Microsoft, AWS) already offer log analysis tools for cloud service users but Google said its tool, which is currently in beta (and free for the time being), comes pre-integrated with a number of its services (BigQuery for analysis, Google Cloud Storage for longer term log data storage) and can be deployed quickly.