Overview of bandwidth usage in Cloud Storage

This page discusses metrics used to monitor data usage rates from your Cloud Storage buckets, as well as how to request additional egress bandwidth for different quotas if you need more than the default quota.

For instructions on accessing monitoring data in Cloud Storage, see Access monitoring data.

Introduction

Cloud Storage provides bandwidth monitoring for you to track bandwidth usage from your project's buckets to other Trusted Cloud by S3NS services. Bandwidth monitoring tracks usage for the last 6 weeks.

Before monitoring bandwidth usage, review the following terms:

  • Egress bandwidth refers to the rate at which data is retrieved from your buckets in the course of completing requests made to Cloud Storage.

    • Google egress bandwidth refers to data retrieved from your buckets that is destined for other Google services, such as Compute Engine.

    • Internet egress bandwidth refers to data retrieved from your buckets that is served to the Internet, such as data downloaded directly to your local computer.

  • Network egress refers to the rate at which data is sent over the network from your buckets to requesters.

In normal operation, egress bandwidth and network egress are typically about the same; however, in some cases egress bandwidth can be meaningfully greater than network egress. Broken connections, cancelled requests, and partial requests are cases where the data retrieved can be greater than the data that's ultimately sent.

Bandwidth monitoring metrics

  • Google egress bandwidth per second per region: monitors Google egress bandwidth usage for buckets in your project that are located in regions.

  • Internet egress bandwidth per second per region: monitors Internet egress bandwidth usage for buckets in your project that are located in regions.

Network monitoring

In addition to Cloud Storage bandwidth monitoring, you can use the network/sent_bytes_count metric to measure Cloud Storage network egress. This is useful for approximating bandwidth usage for specific buckets, because bandwidth monitoring tracks bandwidth usage by location and project.

When using this networking metric, keep in mind the following:

  • network/sent_bytes_count uses bytes in its measurements, whereas typical networking metrics often use bits. For example, a 1 GiBps measurement for network/sent_bytes_count is equivalent to 8 Gibps.

  • network/sent_bytes_count tracks all the traffic sent over the network, not only egress to co-located Trusted Cloud by S3NS services. As such, network/sent_bytes_count is typically greater than bandwidth usage.

    • In some cases, network/sent_bytes_count can be less than bandwidth usage due to events such as broken connections, cancelled requests, and partial requests.

  • network/sent_bytes_count metrics are sampled every 60 seconds. If the traffic is spiky, it's possible that requests are throttled for a short period of time even though the average egress over 60 seconds is below the limit.

Request more bandwidth

To increase the egress bandwidth of your Cloud Storage buckets, request a higher quota.

For more information, see View and manage quotas.

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