A company migrated their entire data/center to Google Cloud Platform. It is running thousands of instances across multiple projects managed by different departments. You want to have a historical record of what was running in Google Cloud Platform at any point in time. What should you do?

The requirement is to maintain a historical record of all cloud resources "at any point in time." Forseti Security is an open-source tool created by Google specifically for this purpose. Its Inventory component takes periodic snapshots of Google Cloud resource configurations and stores them in a database. This allows for auditing, tracking changes over time, and understanding the state of the environment at any historical point, directly fulfilling the user's requirement for a comprehensive historical record.

A. Resource Manager manages the organization, folder, and project hierarchy but does not provide detailed, point-in-time snapshots of all resources within them.
C. Cloud Monitoring (formerly Stackdriver) is for performance metrics and operational logs, not for maintaining a historical configuration inventory of all assets.
D. Security Command Center provides a view of assets but its history is limited (e.g., 35 days for asset metadata), not suitable for an indefinite historical record.

1. Forseti Security Official Documentation

"How Forseti Works"

Section: "Inventory". It states

"Forseti Inventory periodically takes a snapshot of your GCP resource inventory and stores it in a database... This lets you understand what resources you have and track how they change over time."

2. Google Cloud Architecture Center

"Architecture: Forseti Security". The document describes the core components

including Inventory

which "Crawls and stores a snapshot of your GCP resources in a database."

3. Google Cloud Documentation

"Cloud Asset Inventory overview". This document notes that the service "maintains a 35-day history of asset metadata

" which contrasts with Forseti's capability for long-term historical records.