Monitoring flow logs for VPC metrics

Use IBM Cloud® Monitoring to gain operational visibility into the performance and health of your applications, services, and platforms. It offers administrators, DevOps teams, and developers full stack telemetry with advanced features to monitor and troubleshoot, define alerts, and design custom dashboards.

Platform metrics overview

You can view platform metrics when you enable IBM Cloud Monitoring on your IBM Cloud platform. A monitoring instance must be configured in a region to monitor these metrics. For more information, see Enabling platform metrics.

Before you enable IBM Cloud Monitoring on your platform, keep in mind:

You can configure only one instance of the IBM Cloud Monitoring service per region to collect platform metrics.
Platform metrics are regional. Metrics are monitored only from IBM Cloud Monitoring services, which are in the same region of the instance that you want to monitor.
Metrics are collected automatically and are available for monitoring through the IBM Cloud Monitoring-enabled instance.

Metric: Flow log bytes sent

The number of bytes sent to Cloud Object Storage from a flow log collector.

Table 1: Flow log bytes sent
Metadata	Description
`Metric name`	`ibm_is_flow_logs_cos_sent_byte`
`Metric type`	`gauge`
`Value type`	`byte`
`Segment by`	`IBM IS Generation 2, flow log collector virtual server attachment`

Attributes for segmentation

Global attributes

The following attributes are available for segmenting the previously listed metric.

Table 2: Global attributes
Attribute	Attribute Name	Attribute Description
`Cloud type`	`ibm_ctype`	Type of IBM Cloud. Cloud type values are `public`, `dedicated`, or `local`.
`Location`	`ibm_location`	Location of the monitored resource. This value can be a region, data center, or global.
`Resource`	`ibm_resource`	Resource being measured by the service. Typically, this value is an identifying name or GUID.
`Resource type`	`ibm_resource_type`	Type of resource measured by the service.
`Scope`	`ibm_scope`	Scope of the account, organization, or space GUID that is associated with this metric.
`Service name`	`ibm_service_name`	Name of the service generating this metric.

Additional attributes

The following attributes are available for segmenting one or more attributes as described in the preceding reference. See the individual metrics for segmentation options.

Table 3: Additional attributes
Attribute	Attribute Name	Attribute Description
`IBM IS Generation 2`	`ibm_is_generation`	IBM IS Generation ( `2` for Gen. 2)
`Flow log collector VPS attachment`	`ibm_is_flow_log_collector_instance`	The virtual server instance ID where the flow log collector is attached.

Enabling metrics monitoring

To receive monitoring metrics, you must set up your IBM Cloud Monitoring instance.

To receive monitoring metrics, use the following steps:

Navigate to the metrics monitoring portal and click Create a monitoring instance.
Select a region for your monitoring instance.

The region needs to match the location of your existing VPN gateway.
Choose your pricing plan.

Pricing plan details are explained in the selection window. Select the plan that best meets your requirements.
Provide a unique service name for your instance. The name can be any name that you want. The name has no impact on functionality.

Do not give multiple monitoring instances the same name.
Optionally, select a resource group. A resource group organizes account resources in customizable groupings. Any account resource that is managed by using IBM Cloud Identity and Access Management (IAM) access control belongs to a resource group within your account.

If you do not have any pre-configured resource groups, or have no reason to share this resource selectively, use the default selection.

If your account has multiple resource groups, you can choose which group has access to this IBM Cloud Monitoring instance. By using this selective access, metrics can be available to some resource groups and not to others.
Check the Enable Platform Metrics checkbox. You must select this option to receive metrics from your VPN gateway.
Click Create. You are taken back to the monitoring metrics home page.

Within a few minutes, your new monitoring instance is displayed with several configurations. You might have to refresh your browser to see it.

Accessing and viewing metrics

To view metrics for a specific flow log, follow these steps:

From the Flow logs for VPC page, click the Actions menu associated with the flow log. Then, select Monitoring from the menu.
Launch the Monitoring dashboard.