Question

Users of a latency-sensitive application hosted on Compute Engine instances in us-central1 report intermittent slowness when connecting from clients in europe-west1. Your team is unsure whether the degradation is caused by the Google backbone, by their own VPC configuration, or by something on the client side. Before opening a support case, you want to determine whether packet loss and latency between the two regions are elevated across Google's network generally, or only for traffic within your specific project. Which Network Intelligence Center feature and view should you use?

Accepted Answer

Use the Performance Dashboard's Google-wide view to establish a baseline for inter-region packet loss and latency, then compare it against the project-scoped view for your own VPC traffic.

Answer

Run a Connectivity Test between an instance in us-central1 and a client IP in europe-west1 to measure the real-time latency of the data plane.

Answer

Enable VPC Flow Logs on both subnets and analyze the RTT metadata annotations to determine whether Google's backbone is degraded.

Answer

Open Network Topology and inspect the traffic path visualization to identify the exact hop where packet loss is occurring on the Google backbone.