gcloud compute instances describe - describe a virtual machine instance
gcloud compute instances describe INSTANCE_NAME [--zone=ZONE] [GCLOUD_WIDE_FLAG ...]
gcloud 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 compute instances describe test-instance
To output only a set of fields from the available information, specify it using the '--format' flag:
$ gcloud 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
- --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.
These variants are also available:
$ gcloud alpha compute instances describe
$ gcloud beta compute instances describe