Re: CPU 100% on GCP monitor x 20% usage reported b…

Welcome to Google Cloud Community!

The most likely cause of the discrepancy between the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) reported 100% CPU utilization and the 20% reported by the Operating System (OS)/ Ops Agent is hypervisor overhead.

The GCP monitoring system observes total CPU consumption on the physical host, including the virtualization management tasks. The Operating System (OS)/ Ops Agent conversely only measures the CPU used by processes running within the virtual machine (VM). A lightly loaded VM (20% OS/Ops Agent usage) could still contribute to high overall host CPU utilization if other VMs on the same physical server are also active.

There’s nothing you can usually do to directly reduce this, it’s a normal part of running a virtual machine. You can check the compute engine documentation. It explains how VMs are created, managed and provisioned, all of which function directly impacted by hypervisor’s action.

To ensure accurate usage reports between CPU on Cloud Monitoring and Operating System (OS)/Ops Agent, please feel free to reach out to our support team.

I hope the above information is helpful.