Recommendations

Recommenders

A recommender is a service on Google Cloud that provides optimization recommendations for Google Cloud products and resources.

Each recommender lets you view and manage its recommendations and insights using the REST API and Google Cloud CLI. Some recommenders also let you view and manage their recommendations and insights using one or more of the following options:

  • Active Assist
  • FinOps hub, which provides cost-optimization recommendations for billing account managers.
  • The Optimization page in Cloud Hub, which provides cost-optimization recommendations for developers and platform administrators.
  • In context using the service's user interface (UI) in the Google Cloud console

For details about recommenders and supported clients, see Recommenders.

Each recommender has a unique recommender ID that identifies the service. You use the recommender ID when interacting with recommendations using the Recommender gcloud commands, or the REST or RPC APIs.

For more information, see Recommenders.

Recommendations

A recommendation is a machine-generated suggestion for optimizing your usage of Cloud resources. It includes the steps required to take action on the recommendation. Recommenders provide recommendations based on your resource usage, using machine learning or heuristics. Recommender stores recommendations using the Recommendation entity.

A recommendation has the following core attributes:

Name

The recommendation name is stored in the name field of the Recommendation entity. This is the name for the recommendation in the following format:

projects/TARGET_PROJECT_ID/locations/LOCATION/recommenders/RECOMMENDER_ID/recommendations/RECOMMENDATION_ID

where:

  • TARGET_PROJECT_ID is the ID of the project where the recommendation was made.
  • LOCATION is the Google Cloud location where resources associated with the recommendations are located (for example, global or us-central1-a).
  • RECOMMENDER_ID is the fully-qualified recommender ID (for example, google.compute.instance.MachineTypeRecommender).
  • RECOMMENDATION_ID is a unique ID for the recommendation.

Description

The recommendation description is stored in the description field of the Recommendation entity. It is only available in English. This is human-readable text that describes the recommendation. In the Google Cloud console, the description appears when you click to view additional recommendation details.

Recommender subtype

A recommender might have subtypes for specific kinds of recommendations. For example, the Identity and Access Management role recommender has the subtypes REPLACE_ROLE and REMOVE_ROLE. New subtypes might be introduced to the existing recommenders over time. This overview provides a list of all available recommenders. Refer to the recommender documentation to get more information about the recommendation subtypes available.

Recommender impact

An impact quantifies the projected benefits of performing the recommended action. Each recommendation can have the following types of impact that represent outcomes that can occur as a result of applying the recommendation:

  • The primary impact is mandatory and is stored in the primaryImpact field of the Recommendation entity.

  • Secondary impact(s) are optional and stored in the additionalImpact field.

There are the following types of primary and secondary impact:

  • COST: Estimated amount of money that you are projected to save (or incur) if you apply a given recommendation. Refer to the cost field under CostProjection for details.

  • PERFORMANCE: Estimated increase or decrease in performance. Please note that some performance recommendations can result in additional cost (for example, if a recommendation is to increase CPU or memory allocation on an overutilized VM).

  • SECURITY: Estimated improvement in security posture. Refer to the details field under SecurityProjection for details.

  • MANAGEABILITY: Estimated reduction in manual toil.

  • SUSTAINABILITY: Estimated reduction in carbon emissions. Refer to the carbon_footprint_kg_co2 field under SustainabilityProjection and Carbon Footprint reporting methodology for details.

Operation

An Operation is the individual action that must be performed as one of the atomic steps in a suggested recommendation. Operations can represent the following changes:

  • Add, remove, or replace JSON object fields in a Google Cloud resource.
  • Add, remove, or replace JSON array fields in a Google Cloud resource. JSON array elements are identified by defining a filter on the path.
  • Add a new Google Cloud resource.
  • Delete a Google Cloud resource.
  • Test operations to indicate the original state of the resource. The test operations can also be used to verify the current state of a resource before applying the recommendation.
  • Copy and move Google Cloud resources and fields.

Each Operation is loosely based on the JSON Path (RFC 6902) format for patches. This RFC was selected because it provides a more consistent way to reflect resource changes, including complex scenarios commonly found in Google Cloud. For example, IAM recommendations involve nested arrays to reflect moving a principal's role binding to a different role.

For each resource, a changelist (diff-based view) can be generated in the following way:

  • Original state: Test operations represent the original value of a field. This represents the left-hand side of the diff view.
  • Recommended state: Non-test operations represent the recommended changes per field. This represents the right-hand side of the diff view.

Operation groups

An operation group is a set of one or more operations that must be performed in a specific order when you apply a recommendation. A recommendation can have one or more operation groups. Operation groups are stored in the operationGroups field in the Recommendation entity.

For example, a recommendation suggesting that you change the VM instance machine type for a Compute Engine instance group has two operation groups: one where you change the machine type in the instance template, and another where you apply the change to a particular instance group.

Because the first set of operations must complete before the second can be started, these are defined as two separate instance groups in the recommendation.

An operation group can include a test operation. Test operations perform checks to ensure that a recommendation is still valid. The recommendation that suggests changing the VM instance machine type has a test operation that checks whether the current machine type is the same as when the recommendation was made.

State

Recommendations go through many state transitions after they are proposed. A recommendation can have the following states:

  • ACTIVE, which means that the recommendation has been made, but no actions have been taken in response to it. The recommendation can be applied by claiming it. Active recommendations can be updated when resources change.
  • CLAIMED, which means that you or another process has claimed the recommendation and that a response to it is in-progress. When a recommendation is claimed, Recommender does not update it when resources change.
  • SUCCEEDED, which means that you or another process has applied the recommendation to the associated resource.
  • FAILED, which means that an attempt to apply the recommendation has failed.
  • DISMISSED, which means that you or another process has dismissed the recommendation without applying it to the associate resource. This state prevents the recommendation from appearing in the list of recommendations, and is typically applied by an administrator who has invalidated it for various reasons. It also prevents a recommendation from moving to the CLAIMED state.

Information about the state of the recommendation is stored in the stateInfo field of the Recommendation entity. This includes the state itself of the recommendation and any additional per-recommender state metadata.

When a recommendation is changed to CLAIMED, SUCCEEDED, or FAILED state, the content of the recommendation is not updated, and recommendation has a lifespan of 90 days from the time of the state change.

etag

An etag is a unique fingerprint that identifies the current state of a recommendation. Each time the recommendation changes, a new etag value is assigned. This value is stored in the etag field of the Recommender entity.

After you retrieve a recommendation from Recommender using