Google Cloud Platform offers a powerful suite of cloud services and features, but for novice users, it can be a daunting platform to navigate. With hundreds of different services, resources spread across folders and projects, and various related services offerings in different consoles, managing your GCP environment can be a significant challenge.
With Steampipe's relationship graphs for GCP, you can gain better visibility into your cloud infrastructure. Using the GCP plugin, Steampipe's GCP Insights Mod provides dashboards with relational visualization of your cloud resources and how they are connected. This allows you to easily navigate and understand the relationships between users, subscriptions, and resources.
Let's take a closer look at some examples of how Steampipe relationship graphs can help you navigate and manage your GCP infrastructure more effectively.
GCP Compute Network Detail
We can start with your GCP VPC network. You can easily visualize this network and see how resources are connected. You can quickly identify that there is a WordPress instance in the public subnet, with a wordpress SQL database also attached to the VPC. This information can help you troubleshoot issues more effectively, make informed decisions about resource allocation, and understand if there are any misconfigurations you were not expecting.
Compute Instance
We can click on the WordPress Instance to see more details about it. Here, Steampipe relationship graphs provide a detailed view of the resources connected to the instance. We can see that the WordPress instance has a disk and two firewall rules, which are connected to the public subnet of the VPC. Furthermore, we can see that this instance has an IAM service account..
Compute Disk
Diving into the instance’s disk, we learn how it is encrypted, what snapshots are available, and the base Operating system that is used.
SQL Databases
GCP managed SQL Databases don’t reside in the customer’s VPCs. Instead they are in a dedicated VPC that is peered with the customer VPC. As a result they don’t necessarily have a relationship with the subnet as seen in the SQL Relationship Diagram
Uncover hidden details in your GCP organization
These graphs work hand-in-hand with their dashboards' infocards, charts, and tables to help you understand GCP in a whole new way. Which of these seem most useful to you? What other kinds of relationships will help you understand your cloud environments and manage them more effectively?
We're excited to learn more about your experience using the GCP Insights Mod. Our Slack community is a great place to share your feedback and connect with other GCP users.