Private Service Connect (PSC) is a Google Cloud networking product that enables you to access Google Cloud services, third-party partner services, and company-owned applications directly from your Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). PSC helps your network traffic remain secure by keeping it entirely within the Google Cloud network, allowing you to avoid public data transfer and save on egress costs. With PSC, producers can host services in their own VPCs and offer a private connection to their customers. Likewise, consumers can access services privately in their own VPCs.

Many organizations, such as banks, payment providers, and government entities, are looking to expand their monitoring capabilities, but are often limited by industry-related compliance requirements for their data in transit. To help these customers, we’re proud to announce that Datadog is a Google Cloud partner and third-party published service with Private Service Connect, enabling you to connect to Datadog and send your telemetry privately, completely insulated from the public internet. Using Private Service Connect to send your high-volume network logs, load balancer logs, and VPC Flow Logs from Google Cloud to Datadog reduces data transfer costs. If you route these logs to Datadog Log Management’s Flex tier, you can leverage cost-effective analytics and long-term retention options for DevOps, security, and compliance use cases.

In addition to connecting to Datadog via PSC, you can also use our integration to monitor your PSC usage. Our PSC integration allows you to monitor the services that you produce or consume from your VPC and your data traffic as it flows from clients—through PSC backends and PSC endpoints—to services. Monitoring Google Cloud Private Service Connect provides visibility into the performance of your connections, enabling you to identify opportunities to save costs and optimize your network resources.

In this post, we’ll discuss how Datadog’s PSC integration enables you to:

• Monitor the services you consume or produce with PSC

• Track your data as it flows from your client to services via PSC’s private connection

Monitor the services you consume or produce via Private Service Connect

Once you install and configure our PSC integration, you’ll start to collect consumer or producer-related metrics from your PSC connections. Our Google Cloud Private Service Connect preconfigured dashboard displays all active service connections, whether they are published by Google, a third party, or your organization.

By monitoring the services you consume via PSC, you can understand your service health and availability and optimize costs accordingly. Consumers can track proxy metrics, like bytes received and sent as well as open, new, and closed connections, while producers can monitor metrics like connected consumers and used IP addresses. Both consumers and producers can see their dropped packets sent or received, enabling you to fine-tune your service to deliver consistently high performance and reliability or quickly investigate if you see a sudden spike.

For example, let’s say you’re a PSC consumer and decide to review usage metrics on the Google Cloud Private Service Connect dashboard. While analyzing open connections, you notice that several connections consistently have low or zero usage over the last two weeks, indicating that they may be underutilized. After verifying that they haven’t been used in the last 60 days, you terminate the unused connections so your organization doesn’t continue to pay to maintain idle resources.

Track your network traffic as it flows from client to services

Datadog’s PSC integration also gives you visibility into your network activity. Tracking and analyzing your PSC network traffic allows you to optimize performance and resource utilization, detect unauthorized or suspicious activity, and identify opportunities where you can further reduce costs. With the PSC integration, you can establish alerts for bytes, dropped packets, used IP addresses, and more, and then add them directly to any dashboard.

For example, let’s say you receive an alert that the amount of available IP addresses in a Network Address Translation (NAT) subnet has fallen below your predefined threshold. You know that IP address exhaustion will result in connection failures, interrupting your consumers’ user experience. In response, you scale your NAT resources to ensure that your service continues to perform optimally and remains available to your consumers.

Start monitoring Google Cloud Private Service Connect with Datadog today

Datadog’s integration makes it easy to monitor the services you consume or produce via PSC and the network traffic that flows through its private and secure connection. Monitoring PSC with Datadog enables you to maintain service health, detect anomalies, and optimize costs and resources. You can learn more about the PSC integration in our documentation.

Connecting to Datadog via PSC allows you to send your telemetry to Datadog privately and save on egress costs. If you want to learn how to connect to Datadog via PSC, visit this documentation. Or, if you want to collect metrics from other Google Cloud services, check out our integrations. If you’re new to Datadog, you can sign up for a free 14-day trial today.