Unlock traffic visibility across your network
Summary
Join us as we explore how to achieve comprehensive network observability using VPC Flow Logs and the Flow Analyzer tool. Learn how to get detailed, real-time insights into your network traffic, transforming raw data into actionable intelligence. This session covers everything from setup to advanced analysis, empowering you to enhance security, ensure compliance, optimize costs, and troubleshoot complex network issues with precision.
Challenge
Modern networks are increasingly complex, spanning on-premises data centers and multiple cloud providers. As your Google Cloud deployment scales, this complexity can create significant blind spots, making it difficult to monitor traffic effectively, diagnose connectivity issues, and detect security threats. Without the right tools, IT teams struggle to understand traffic patterns, attribute costs, and ensure that network policies are being enforced correctly.
Solution
VPC Flow Logs provides a powerful solution by capturing detailed information about the IP traffic moving through your Virtual Private Cloud. VPC Flow Logs records the essential "five-tuple" (source/destination IP, source/destination port, and protocol) and enriches this data with invaluable metadata, including VM names, GKE cluster details, geographic information for internet traffic, and more. When this data is sent to Cloud Logging, you can use Flow Analyzer—a no-cost, integrated tool—to visualize, query, and analyze your network flows without writing complex queries. [5:50, 10:10]
Demo Highlights
→Instantly Visualize Top Talkers: The demo shows how Flow Analyzer's default view immediately aggregates traffic by source IP, allowing you to see the "top talkers" in your network at a glance and drill down into the rich metadata for any specific flow. [7:44]
→Detect Anomalous Behavior: You can compare a current traffic flow to a previous period (e.g., the same hour yesterday) to visualize changes and quickly spot potentially anomalous or concerning traffic patterns. [8:13]
→Troubleshoot with In-Context Tools: Without leaving the interface, you can launch a Connectivity Test directly from a traffic flow to perform a static configuration analysis, helping you diagnose potential routing or firewall issues at no extra cost. [8:41, 8:52]
Google Cloud products used:
VPC Flow Logs
Flow Analyzer
Network Intelligence Center
Learn more:
→ Overview of VPC Flow Logs: https://cloud.google.com/vpc/docs/using-flow-logs
→ Flow Analyzer Documentation: https://cloud.google.com/network-intelligence-center/docs/flow-analyzer/overview
→ Get started with VPC Flow Logs analysis with this Google Cloud Blog: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/networking/how-to-use-vpc-flow-logs-in-gcp-for-network-traffic-analysis