Access Key Visualizer

Key Visualizer is enabled in Spanner by default.

Before you begin

To view Key Visualizer, you need the following Identity and Access Management (IAM) permission:

• spanner.databases.read

If you are a fine-grained access control user, you must have been granted access to:

• the spanner_sys_reader system role or one of its member roles.

For more information, see About fine-grained access control and Fine-grained access control system roles.

Access the Key Visualizer interface

You access the Key Visualizer tool from the Google Cloud console.

To access Key Visualizer:

1. From the Spanner page of the Google Cloud console, select an instance.

2. Select a database to investigate.

3. In the navigation menu, under Observability, select Key Visualizer.

Disable Key Visualizer

Key Visualizer is controlled by the enable_key_visualizer database option. The default value is true.

To disable Key Visualizer, set the value of the enable_key_visualizer database option to false. The DDL syntax to disable Key Visualizer is:

ALTERDATABASE`database_id`SETOPTIONS(enable_key_visualizer=false)

If your database ID contains characters other than letters, numbers, or underscores, be sure to enclose the ID with backticks (``).

The statement can be sent using a gcloud command, or in an UpdateDatabaseDdl gRPC/REST request. For example:

gcloudspannerdatabasesddlupdatedatabase_id--instance=instance_id\
--ddl='ALTER DATABASE `database_id` SET OPTIONS ( enable_key_visualizer=false )'

Once you've explicitly set the value for enable_key_visualizer, you can check its value by clicking SHOW EQUIVALENT DDL in the overview page, or using the ddl describe gcloud command:

gcloudspannerdatabasesddldescribe`database_id`--instance=instance_id

Re-enable Key Visualizer

To re-enable Key Visualizer, follow the previous instructions, setting the value of the enable_key_visualizer database option to true.

When first re-enabled for a database, the Key Visualizer heatmap will be empty for the first few minutes while Spanner collects metrics.

What's next

• Learn to recognize common patterns in heatmaps.
• Find out how to explore a heatmap in depth.
• Read about the metrics you can view in a heatmap.