gcloud alpha compute instances describe - describe a virtual machine instance
gcloud alpha compute instances describe INSTANCE_NAME [--guest-attributes=[GUEST_ATTRIBUTE_KEY,...]] [--zone=ZONE] [GCLOUD_WIDE_FLAG ...]
(ALPHA) gcloud alpha compute instances describe displays all data associated with a Compute Engine virtual machine instance.
It's possible to limit the the scope of the description by using the '--format' flag. For details, see Filtering and formatting fun with gcloud https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/filtering-and-formatting-fun-with.
To describe an instance named test-instance, run:
$ gcloud alpha compute instances describe test-instance
To output only a set of fields from the available information, specify it using the '--format' flag:
$ gcloud alpha compute instances describe test-instance \ --format="yaml(name,status,disks)"
- INSTANCE_NAME
Name of the instance to describe. For details on valid instance names, refer to the criteria documented under the field 'name' at: https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/reference/rest/v1/instances
- --guest-attributes=[GUEST_ATTRIBUTE_KEY,...]
Instead of instance resource display guest attributes of the instance stored with the given keys.
- --zone=ZONE
Zone of the instance to describe. If not specified, you might be prompted to select a zone (interactive mode only). gcloud attempts to identify the appropriate zone by searching for resources in your currently active project. If the zone cannot be determined, gcloud prompts you for a selection with all available Google Cloud Platform zones.
To avoid prompting when this flag is omitted, the user can set the compute/zone property:
$ gcloud config set compute/zone ZONE
A list of zones can be fetched by running:
$ gcloud compute zones list
To unset the property, run:
$ gcloud config unset compute/zone
Alternatively, the zone can be stored in the environment variable CLOUDSDK_COMPUTE_ZONE.
These flags are available to all commands: --access-token-file, --account, --billing-project, --configuration, --flags-file, --flatten, --format, --help, --impersonate-service-account, --log-http, --project, --quiet, --trace-token, --user-output-enabled, --verbosity.
Run $ gcloud help for details.
This command is currently in alpha and might change without notice. If this command fails with API permission errors despite specifying the correct project, you might be trying to access an API with an invitation-only early access allowlist. These variants are also available:
$ gcloud compute instances describe
$ gcloud beta compute instances describe