Over the past several months we’ve been focused on improving observability and operations workflows for Compute Engine. Today, we are excited to share the first wave of these enhancements are now available. These include: Significantly improved operating system support for the Cloud Monitoring and Cloud Logging agents. The ability to rapidly deploy, update, and remove agents to groups of VMs, or all of your VMs, by policy, with as little as a single gcloud command.

There are an increasing number of organizations, who are moving their Virtual Apps and Desktops deployments to Citrix Cloud by using the Virtual Apps and Desktops service. Citrix Cloud allows you to host components such as your core management layer for a Virtual Apps and Desktops deployment in the cloud, managed and kept up to date by Citrix.

When something as ubiquitous as Google goes down, there is a lot of online frenzy with users tweeting and searching for updates on the issue. That’s exactly what we witnessed today between 9/24/2020 17:59:44 PST to 9/24/2020 18:23:20 PST. Multiple Google services like Mail, Drive, Meet, Hangouts experienced downtime. Frustrated users took to Twitter to report the outage and the tweets were captured by Websee. Users trying to access Google services got a 502 error screen.

Cloud Monitoring has always provided comprehensive visibility and management into individual Compute Engine virtual machines (VMs). But many Google Cloud customers have hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of VMs that they need to manage. Cloud Monitoring now gives you zero-config, out-of-the-box visibility into your entire Compute Engine VM fleet, with quick access to advanced Monitoring features such as installing the Cloud Monitoring agent and configuring fleetwide alerts.

Many customers we have are hybrid – meaning they have both Azure and on-prem estate, and subsequently both SquaredUp for Azure and SquaredUp for SCOM deployments. In other cases, some customers are using multiple different deployments of a product, for example for multiple SCOM management groups or multiple Azure tenants.

HashiCorp Packer is a free and open source tool for creating golden images for multiple platforms from a single source configuration. Packer makes it easy to codify VM images for Microsoft Azure. In this blog post we’ll look at how to use HashiCorp Packer and Puppet Bolt to define our VM templates in code.