Challenge 2: Explore Firebase Genkit Monitoring

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Introduction

As SREs, maintaining the reliability and performance of your application hinges on having tooling to give you visibility into the behavior of a live, production environment.

In this challenge, you’ll explore Firebase Genkit Monitoring to understand the reliability and performance of the Movie Guru app by navigating to different sections, understanding the types of data each of them displays, and learning how to interpret the information presented. This foundational knowledge is crucial for effectively diagnosing and resolving issues in the subsequent challenges.

Description

Explore the Firebase Genkit Monitoring and understand the application’s performance and execution. Navigate to the Genkit monitoring dashboard on the firebase console by selecting “Genkit” in the left-side panel under “AI” product category.

  1. Assess overall health: Based on this high-level view, what potential areas look like they might need attention?
  2. Inspect by feature: Identify individual GenAI features in the app.
  3. Find the critical path: Isolate the feature that handles core user interactions. Analyze its metrics.
    • How healthy is this feature?
    • Where might bottlenecks exist?
  4. Inspect individual requests: Interact with the app to generate a fresh trace.
    • Find the specific trace for this new interaction.
    • Identify the specific steps that were performed to respond to a user (e.g., model calls, data retrieval). Where is the code for each step?
  5. Leverage integrated observability: From the trace details, use the tri-dot menu to access related logs and traces in Google Cloud Logging and Google Cloud Trace.
    • What additional context do these tools provide?

Success Criteria

  • You are able to name the key metrics displayed on the Genkit Monitoring Dashbord.
  • You know the different features that comprise the Movie Guru app and what they do.
  • You are able to name the key metrics displayed on the Genkit Monitoring Dashbord, per feature.
  • You know the different steps that the app takes to answer a user’s query.
  • You can correlate data in the monitoring dashboard with data in Cloud.

Tips

  • Genkit Feature

    In the context of Genkit monitoring and observability, a feature represents a distinct, identifiable functional component or capability within your Genkit application.

    These features serve as logical units for which performance metrics (such as request count, success rate, and latency) and execution traces are aggregated and displayed in the Genkit monitoring dashboard.

    Think of a feature as a specific task or workflow segment that you want to observe and analyze independently. Examples in an application could include:

    • Handling a specific type of user query (e.g., “Movie Search”).
    • Executing a particular agentic step or tool use.

    • Processing a specific data loading or transformation task.

      By breaking down your application’s execution into features, the monitoring dashboard allows you to quickly assess the health and performance of individual components.

Learning Resources

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