On the Compute Engine VM in us-west-1b, I run 16 vCPUs near 99% usage. After a few hours, the VM automatically crashes. This is not a one-time incident, and I have to manually restart the VM.
There are a few instances of CPU usage suddenly dropping to around 30%, then bouncing back to 99%.
There are no logs for the VM at the time of the crash. Is there any other way to get the error logs?
How do I prevent VMs from crashing?
CPU usage graph
This could be your process manager saying that your processes are out of resources. You might wanna look into Kernel tuning where you can increase the limits on the number of active processes on your VM/OS and their resources. Or you can try using a bigger machine with more physical resources. In short, your machine is falling short on resources and hence in order to keep the OS up, process manager shuts down the processes. SSH is one of those processes. Once you reset the machine, all comes back to normal.
How process manager/kernel decides to quit a process varies in many ways. It could simply be that a process has consistently stayed up for way long time to consume too many resources. Also, one thing to note is that OS images that you use to create a VM on GCP is custom hardened by Google to make sure that they can limit malicious capabilities of processes running on such machines.
One of the best ways to tackle this is:
