This page describes how Storage Intelligence advisor lets you monitor and manage your Cloud Storage environment at scale across organizations, folders, and projects.
Storage Intelligence advisor displays trends, anomalies, and security risk assessment findings in your storage patterns, and provides built-in recommendations to optimize usage, resolve performance bottlenecks, and align security configurations with recommended best practices.
To view Storage Intelligence advisor, see View Storage Intelligence advisor.
Storage Intelligence advisor structure and sections
To help you manage your storage environment, Storage Intelligence advisor displays insights through a structured hierarchy of metrics, findings, and next steps:
- Metrics: data points collected from your Cloud Storage environment, such as storage volume, object counts, and operation rates.
- Findings: anomalies and security configuration gaps detected from your metrics and object metadata that require attention, such as a spike in errors, inefficient storage use, or objects that violate bucket encryption policies.
- Next steps: recommendations provided with each finding to help you resolve the identified issue.
To help you analyze your storage data, Storage Intelligence advisor includes the following sections.
At a glance
The At a glance section provides a daily snapshot of your storage environment. The section label adapts to your selected resource: Project at a glance, Folder at a glance, or Organization at a glance. It displays key metrics such as total storage size, bucket and object counts, and average object size. The following table describes how to use these metrics to analyze your storage utilization:
| Metric | Description |
|---|---|
| Total storage size | The total size of your storage across multi-regional and regional storage classes. |
| Total buckets with objects | The number of buckets that contain at least one object. |
| Total objects | The total number of objects in your selected resource scope. |
| Average object size | The mean size of objects in your project, folder, or organization, which indicates storage efficiency. |
Top findings
The Top findings section alerts you to changes in storage behavior and security configuration gaps that require attention. Depending on the selected resource scope, findings provide aggregated or granular insights:
- Organization and folder scopes: each finding card aggregates findings across contained projects, displays the number of affected projects, and lets you view a list of affected projects to drill down into project-specific finding details.
- Project scope: finding cards let you drill down into bucket-level and object-level details for that project.
Each finding is associated with one of the following categories to indicate its impact:
Usage optimization: findings that affect storage usage and cost efficiency.
Performance: findings that affect speed, latency, and operational health.
Security and compliance (Preview): findings that identify security and encryption configuration gaps, such as objects that don't comply with bucket encryption policies.
The following table describes the findings that are available in Storage Intelligence advisor:
| Finding | Category | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Spike in Class A or B operations on Coldline or Archive data | Usage optimization | Indicates frequent operations on data in Coldline storage and Archive storage. For example, you might see this finding if an analytics job accesses monthly reports in Archive storage daily. This daily access results in a high operation rate for data better suited for Standard storage. To resolve this finding, move the data to a storage class suited for frequent access, or configure the analytics job to use cached data. For more information, see Optimize usage for Coldline and Archive storage data. |
| Spike in 429 errors indicating rate limited requests | Performance | Indicates that Cloud Storage is rate-limiting requests, which causes latency and timeouts. For example, you might see this finding if a batch processing job rapidly reads or writes many objects in the same bucket. This burst of requests exceeds per-bucket limits and triggers For more information, see Improve performance by mitigating rate limited request errors. |
| Spike in cross-region egress | Usage optimization | Indicates an increase in data transfer between Cloud Storage buckets in one region and Compute Engine instances or other Google Cloud services in another region. This cross-region traffic can lead to unexpected egress costs. For example, you might see this finding if a Compute Engine instance in For more information, see Manage cross-region egress. |
| Total bytes stored increased above trend over the last 30 days | Usage optimization | Indicates that storage consumption has increased beyond historical trends over the last 30 days. For example, you might see this finding if your bucket retains noncurrent object versions indefinitely after you upload new versions. Indefinite retention can lead to unnecessary storage costs. To resolve this finding, use Object Lifecycle Management to delete noncurrent versions or move them to colder storage, or enable Autoclass to automatically manage storage classes based on access patterns. For more information, see Identify above trend storage consumption. |
| Objects violate default CMEK bucket policies (Preview) | Security and compliance | Indicates that a bucket with a default customer-managed encryption key (CMEK) contains objects that aren't encrypted with CMEK. For example, you might see this finding if you uploaded objects before setting the bucket's default Cloud Key Management Service (Cloud KMS) key. To resolve this finding, identify the non-compliant objects by using Storage Insights datasets and re-encrypt them with the bucket's default Cloud KMS key. For more information, see Re-encrypt objects that violate default CMEK bucket policies. |
| Objects violate enforced encryption rules (Preview) | Security and compliance | Indicates that a bucket contains objects that use an encryption method restricted by the bucket's encryption enforcement configuration. For example, you might see this finding if you uploaded objects encrypted with standard encryption (Google default encryption, or GMEK) or customer-supplied encryption keys (CSEK) before restricting those methods on the bucket. To resolve this finding, identify the non-compliant objects by using Storage Insights datasets and re-encrypt them with an allowed encryption method. For more information, see Re-encrypt objects that violate enforced encryption rules. |
Key charts
The Key charts section contains time-series charts that help you visualize the following storage trends:
- Cumulative object count: tracks the total number of objects in your selected project, folder, or organization across locations and storage classes.
- Storage volume over time: tracks storage size across locations and storage classes.
Use cases
Storage Intelligence advisor supports the following use cases.
Minimize custom reporting
Track metrics across your Cloud Storage environment without maintaining custom data processing pipelines, BigQuery scripts, or external visualization tools.
Centralize oversight
Assess the health of your entire Cloud Storage environment from a single interface across projects, folders, or organizations, without running manual queries across various logs or resources.
To get started, see View Storage Intelligence advisor.
Optimize storage usage
Identify opportunities to optimize storage usage by aligning data with the
appropriate storage class. For example, a Spike in Class A or B operations on
Coldline or Archive data finding indicates frequent access to data in
Coldline storage or Archive storage. This data might be better suited
for a storage class intended for frequent access, such as Standard storage or
Nearline storage.
For more information, see Optimize usage for Coldline and Archive storage data.
Resolve performance bottlenecks
Identify performance issues, such as request throttling or unexpected operation
spikes. Findings such as Spike in 429 errors help you optimize I/O
patterns to improve application reliability.
For more information, see Improve performance by mitigating rate limited request errors.
Monitor security and compliance
Continuously evaluate your Cloud Storage security and encryption
compliance with automated object-level analysis. When you enable
Storage Intelligence, Storage Intelligence advisor
automatically runs security risk assessments in the background and refreshes
findings every 24 hours. Storage Intelligence advisor aggregates
object-level encryption violations at the bucket level, including the
Objects violate default CMEK bucket policies and Objects violate enforced
encryption rules findings. You can identify affected objects by querying
Storage Insights datasets in BigQuery and re-encrypt them by using
Storage batch operations or the Google Cloud CLI.
For more information, see Re-encrypt objects that violate default CMEK bucket policies and Re-encrypt objects that violate enforced encryption rules.
VPC Service Controls support
Storage Intelligence advisor supports VPC Service Controls for project-level resources inside a service perimeter. For details about VPC Service Controls support and resource-level limitations, see VPC Service Controls supported products: Cloud Storage.
What's next
- View Storage Intelligence advisor
- Review the findings reference catalog
- Data encryption options
- Storage classes
- Object Lifecycle Management