Set up VM Manager

On Compute Engine you can manage the operating systems that are running on your virtual machines (VMs) by using VM Manager.

You can enable VM Manager for individual VMs, or for a project, or for all projects in a folder or organization. To review the steps needed to set up your VMs to use VM Manager, see Setup overview.

After setting up VM Manager, you can view audit logs for API operations performed with the OS Config API, see Viewing VM Manager audit logs.

Before you begin

Supported operating systems

For the full list of operating system versions that support VM Manager, see Operating system details. If the OS config agent is not available for a particular operating system, you cannot enable VM Manager for a VM that runs this operating system.

Enable the OS Config service API

You can enable the OS Config API for your Google Cloud projects by using one of the following methods:

Required roles

This predefined role contains the serviceusage.services.enable permission, which is required to enable the API.

Enable OS Config API for a single project

Enable OS Config API for multiple projects

To enable the OS Config API (VM Manager API) for all of the projects in an organization or folder, use hierarchical service activation. Because this feature automatically enables a service for all existing and new projects within your Google Cloud resource hierarchy, you don't need to manually enable the service for each project.

Required roles

To get the permissions that you need to manage service enablement, ask your administrator to grant you the Service Usage Admin (roles/serviceusage.serviceUsageAdmin) IAM role on your target resource. For more information about granting roles, see Manage access to projects, folders, and organizations.

This predefined role contains the permissions required to manage service enablement. To see the exact permissions that are required, expand the Required permissions section:

Set the VM Manager metadata by using an organization policy

You can automatically set the VM Manager metadata for all new VMs in your organization, folder, or project by using the Require OS Config organization policy.

When the Require OS Config boolean constraint is set up, the following conditions are applied:

When the OS Config organization policy is enabled, you can still use the osconfig-disabled-features metadata to disable one or more VM Manager features.

Enable OS Config organization policy

Permissions required for this task

To perform this task, you must have the following permissions:

resourcemanager.organizationAdmin role. For more information see, Access control for organizations using IAM.
To learn more about managing policies at the organization level, see Add an organization policy administrator.

To enable the OS Config policy, you can set the Require OS Config constraint on the entire organization, folders, or specific projects by using either the Google Cloud console or the Google Cloud CLI.

Console

To set the OS Config organization policy from the console, complete the following steps:

In the Google Cloud console, go to the Organization policies page.

Go to Organization policies
From the project picker, select the project, folder, or organization for which you want to edit organization policies.
The Organization policies page displays a filterable list of organization policy constraints that are available.
Select Require OS Config constraint from the list of constraints. The Policy details page that appears describes the constraint and provides information about how the constraint is applied.
To update the organization policy for this resource, click Manage policy.
On the Edit policy page, select Override parent's policy.
Select Add a rule.
Under Enforcement, select whether enforcement of this organization policy should be on.
To enforce the policy, click Set policy.

gcloud

To set the OS Config organization policy, use the gcloud beta resource-manager org-policies enable-enforce command.

Find your organization ID.
```
gcloud organizations list
```

Set the constraint in your organization. Replace organization-id with your your organization ID.

gcloud resource-manager org-policies enable-enforce compute.requireOsConfig \
    --organization=organization-id

You can also apply the OS Config organization policy to a folder or a project with the --folder or the --project flags, and the folder ID and project ID, respectively.

For folders, run the following command:

gcloud resource-manager org-policies enable-enforce compute.requireOsConfig \
    --folder=folder-id

For projects, run the following command:

gcloud resource-manager org-policies enable-enforce compute.requireOsConfig \
    --project=project-id

Replace the following:

folder-id: your folder ID.
project-id: your project ID.

Enable VM Manager in a project

To enable VM Manager in your project, you have two options:

Automatic enablement: applies to your entire Google Cloud project. You complete automatic enablement from the Google Cloud console. You might still need to manually complete some steps.
Manual enablement: can be done per VM or for the entire Google Cloud project.

Manual

To manually set up VM Manager, complete the following steps:

In your Google Cloud project, enable the OS Config API.
On each VM, check if the OS Config agent is installed. If the agent is not already installed, install the OS Config agent.
On either your project or on each VM, set instance metadata for the OS Config agent. This step is needed to make the OS Config agent active in your VM or project.
Verify that all VMs have an attached service account. You don't need to grant any IAM roles to this service account. VM Manager uses this service account to sign requests to the API service.
If your VM is running within a private Virtual Private Cloud network and does not have public internet access, enable Private Google Access.
If you use HTTP proxy for your VMs, configure an HTTP proxy.
Optional. On either your project or on each VM, disable the features that you don't need.

Automatic

The first time you navigate to any of the VM Manager pages in the Google Cloud console, you can choose to automatically enable VM Manager.

If you follow the guided steps, you can use the automatic enablement to complete the following:

Enable VM Manager (OS Config API) on the Google Cloud project
Activate OS Config agents on all VMs in the Google Cloud project that have the agent installed

Automatic enablement.

Check if the OS Config agent is installed

The OS Config agent is installed by default on CentOS, Container-Optimized OS (COS), Debian, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), Rocky Linux, SLES, Ubuntu, and Windows Server images that have a build date of v20200114 or later. For information about the versions of operating systems with the OS Config agent installed, see Operating system details. These agents run idly until you enable the agent metadata, and enable the service API.

Linux

To check whether your Linux VM has the agent installed, run the following command:

sudo systemctl status google-osconfig-agent

If the agent is installed and running, the output resembles the following:

google-osconfig-agent.service - Google OSConfig Agent
Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/google-osconfig-agent.service; enabled; vendor preset:
Active: active (running) since Wed 2020-01-15 00:14:22 UTC; 6min ago
Main PID: 369 (google_osconfig)
 Tasks: 8 (limit: 4374)
Memory: 102.7M
CGroup: /system.slice/google-osconfig-agent.service
        └─369 /usr/bin/google_osconfig_agent

If the agent is not installed, install the OS Config agent.

Windows

To check whether your Windows VM has the agent installed, run the following command:

PowerShell Get-Service google_osconfig_agent

If the agent is installed and running, the output resembles the following:

Status   Name               DisplayName
------   ----               -----------
Running  google_osconfig... Google OSConfig Agent

If the agent is not installed, install the OS Config agent.

Install the OS Config agent

Before you follow these steps to install the agent, check if the agent is already running on your VM.

On each VM, install the OS Config agent. You can install the OS Config agent by using one of the following options:

Install the agent manually from the terminal.
Use a startup script on your VMs.
Automate the installation of OS Config on multiple VMs by using a Google Cloud Observability agent policy.
Install Ops Agent during VM creation.

Install the agent manually

Use this option to install the OS Config agent on an existing VM.

To install the agent, complete the following steps:

Connect to the VM that you want to install the OS Config agent on.

Install the OS Config agent.

Windows Server

To install the OS Config agent on a Windows server, run the following command:

googet -noconfirm install google-osconfig-agent

Ubuntu

To install the OS Config agent on an Ubuntu VM, run the following commands:

Set up the Ubuntu repository.

For Ubuntu 20.04 and later versions, run the following commands:

Add the Ubuntu repository.

sudo su -c "echo 'deb http://packages.cloud.google.com/apt google-compute-engine-focal-stable main' > \
/etc/apt/sources.list.d/google-compute-engine.list"

Import the Google Cloud public key.

curl https://packages.cloud.google.com/apt/doc/apt-key.gpg | \
sudo apt-key add -

For Ubuntu 18.04 and later versions, run the following commands:

Add the Ubuntu repository.

sudo su -c "echo 'deb http://packages.cloud.google.com/apt google-compute-engine-bionic-stable main' > \
/etc/apt/sources.list.d/google-compute-engine.list"

Import the Google Cloud public key.

curl https://packages.cloud.google.com/apt/doc/apt-key.gpg | \
sudo apt-key add -

For Ubuntu 16.04, run the following commands:

Add the Ubuntu repository.

sudo su -c "echo 'deb http://packages.cloud.google.com/apt google-compute-engine-xenial-stable main'> \
/etc/apt/sources.list.d/google-compute-engine.list"

Import the Google Cloud public key.

curl https://packages.cloud.google.com/apt/doc/apt-key.gpg | \
sudo apt-key add -

Install the OS Config agent.

sudo apt update
sudo apt -y install google-osconfig-agent

Debian

To install the OS Config agent on a Debian VM, run the following commands:

sudo apt update
sudo apt -y install google-osconfig-agent

Adding the Google Cloud repository and public key

If you are using a VM instance that was not created from a Google-provided image or got a "unable to locate package" error message, complete the following steps to add the Google Cloud repository and import the public key.

After you add the repository and import the key, you can then run the commands to install the OS Config agent.

Set up the Debian Cloud repository:

Debian 13 and later

Install the public repository GPG key to /etc/apt/keyrings:

sudo curl https://packages.cloud.google.com/apt/doc/apt-key.gpg -o /etc/apt/keyrings/google-keyring.gpg

Determine the Debian distro name. Then, create the source list file, /etc/apt/sources.list.d/google-cloud.list:

eval $(grep VERSION_CODENAME /etc/os-release)
sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/google-cloud.list << EOM
deb [signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/google-keyring.gpg] http://packages.cloud.google.com/apt google-compute-engine-${VERSION_CODENAME}-stable main
EOM

Debian 12 and earlier

Install the public repository GPG key:

curl https://packages.cloud.google.com/apt/doc/apt-key.gpg | sudo apt-key add -

Determine the Debian distro name. Then, create the source list file, /etc/apt/sources.list.d/google-cloud.list:

eval $(grep VERSION_CODENAME /etc/os-release)
sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/google-cloud.list << EOM
deb http://packages.cloud.google.com/apt google-compute-engine-${VERSION_CODENAME}-stable main
deb http://packages.cloud.google.com/apt google-cloud-packages-archive-keyring-${VERSION_CODENAME} main
EOM

RHEL/CentOS/Rocky

To install the OS Config agent on a RHEL 7/8, CentOS 7/8 VM or Rocky Linux 8/9, run the following command:

sudo yum -y install google-osconfig-agent

SLES/openSUSE

To install the OS Config agent on a SLES or openSUSE VM, run the following commands:

Set up the SLES repository.

For SLES 12, run the following command:

sudo su -c "cat > /etc/zypp/repos.d/google-compute-engine.repo <<EOM
[google-compute-engine]
name=Google Compute Engine
baseurl=https://packages.cloud.google.com/yum/repos/google-compute-engine-sles12-stable
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
repo_gpgcheck=0
gpgkey=https://packages.cloud.google.com/yum/doc/yum-key.gpg
  https://packages.cloud.google.com/yum/doc/rpm-package-key.gpg
EOM"

For SLES 15 and OpenSUSE 15, run the following command:

sudo su -c "cat > /etc/zypp/repos.d/google-compute-engine.repo <<EOM
[google-compute-engine]
name=Google Compute Engine
baseurl=https://packages.cloud.google.com/yum/repos/google-compute-engine-sles15-stable
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
repo_gpgcheck=0
gpgkey=https://packages.cloud.google.com/yum/doc/yum-key.gpg
  https://packages.cloud.google.com/yum/doc/rpm-package-key.gpg
EOM"

Import the GPG keys for Google Cloud.

sudo rpm --import https://packages.cloud.google.com/yum/doc/yum-key.gpg \
--import https://packages.cloud.google.com/yum/doc/rpm-package-key.gpg

Install the OS Config agent.

sudo zypper -n --gpg-auto-import-keys install --from google-compute-engine google-osconfig-agent

Install the agent using a startup script

You can also use the manual installation commands to create a startup script that installs the OS Config agent during VM creation.

Copy the manual commands for your operating system.
Provide the startup script to your VM creation method.

For example, if you are using the gcloud compute instances create command to create a Debian 10 VM, your command resembles the following:
```
gcloud compute instances create VM_NAME \
   --image-family=debian-10 --image-project=debian-cloud \
   --metadata startup-script='#! /bin/bash
   apt update
   apt -y install google-osconfig-agent'
```
Replace VM_NAME with the name of your VM.
Verify that the startup script completes. To verify whether the startup script completes, review the logs or check the serial console.

Set the metadata values

You can either set instance metadata on each VM or project metadata that applies to all VMs in your project.

On your Google Cloud project or VM, set the enable-osconfig metadata value to TRUE. Setting the enable-osconfig metadata value to TRUE enables the following:

Patch
OS policies
OS inventory management
- For the earlier version of OS inventory management, you must also set the enable-guest-attributes metadata value to TRUE. If both metadata values are not set, the dashboard shows no data for the VM. This is not needed for the later version. For information about the two OS inventory management versions, see OS inventory management versions.

Console

You can apply the metadata values on your Google Cloud projects or VMs using one of the following options:

Option 1: Set enable-osconfig in project-wide metadata, so that it applies to all of the VMs in your project.
1. In the Google Cloud console, go to the Metadata page.
  
  Go to Metadata
2. Click Edit.
3. Add the following metadata entry:
  
  Key: enable-osconfig
  Value: TRUE
  
  For the earlier version of OS inventory management, set both enable-osconfig and enable-guest-attributes:
  - Key: enable-osconfig
    Value: TRUE
  - Key: enable-guest-attributes
    Value: TRUE
4. Click Save to apply the changes.
Option 2: Set enable-osconfig in VM metadata when you create an instance.
1. In the Google Cloud console, go to the Create an instance page.
  
  Go to Create an instance
2. Specify the VM details.
3. Expand the Advanced options section, and do the following:
  1. Expand the Management section.
  2. In the Metadata section, click Add item and add the following metadata entries:
    
    Key: enable-osconfig
    Value: TRUE.
    
    For the earlier version of OS inventory management, set both enable-osconfig and enable-guest-attributes:
    - Key: enable-osconfig
      Value: TRUE
    - Key: enable-guest-attributes
      Value: TRUE
4. To create the VM, click Create.
Option 3: Set enable-osconfig in metadata of an existing VM.
1. In the Google Cloud console, go to the VM instances page.
  
  Go to VM instances
2. Click the name of the VM for which you want to set the metadata value.
3. On the Instance details page, click Edit to edit the settings.
4. Under Custom metadata, add the following metadata entries:
  
  Key: enable-osconfig
  Value: TRUE.
  
  For the earlier version of OS inventory management, set both enable-osconfig and enable-guest-attributes:
  - Key: enable-osconfig
    Value: TRUE
  - Key: enable-guest-attributes
    Value: TRUE
5. Click Save to apply your changes to the VM.

gcloud

Use the project-info add-metadata or the instances add-metadata command with the --metadata=enable-osconfig=TRUE flag.

You can apply the metadata values on your projects or VMs using one of the following options:

Option 1: Set enable-osconfig in project-wide metadata, so that it applies to all of the instances in your project:
```
gcloud compute project-info add-metadata \
  --project PROJECT_ID \
  --metadata=enable-osconfig=TRUE
```
For the earlier version of OS inventory management, set both enable-osconfig and enable-guest-attributes:
```
gcloud compute project-info add-metadata \
  --project PROJECT_ID \
  --metadata=enable-guest-attributes=TRUE,enable-osconfig=TRUE
```
Replace PROJECT_ID with your project ID.
Option 2: Set enable-osconfig in metadata of an existing instance.
```
gcloud compute instances add-metadata VM_NAME \
  --metadata=enable-osconfig=TRUE
```
For the earlier version of OS inventory management, set both enable-osconfig and enable-guest-attributes:
```
gcloud compute instances add-metadata VM_NAME \
  --metadata=enable-guest-attributes=TRUE,enable-osconfig=TRUE
```
Replace VM_NAME with the name of your VM.
Option 3: Set enable-osconfig in instance metadata when you create an instance.
```
gcloud compute instances create VM_NAME \
  --metadata=enable-osconfig=TRUE
```
For the earlier version of OS inventory management, set both enable-osconfig and enable-guest-attributes:
```
gcloud compute instances create VM_NAME \
  --metadata=enable-guest-attributes=TRUE,enable-osconfig=TRUE
```
Replace VM_NAME with the name of your VM.

REST

You can set the metadata value at either the Google Cloud project or instance level.

For instructions on setting project-wide metadata, see setting project-wide custom metadata.
For instructions on setting instance metadata, see setting instance metadata.

The following key-value pair is required as part of the metadata property:

Key: enable-osconfig
Value: TRUE

For the earlier version of OS inventory management, also add the following key-value pair:

Key: enable-guest-attributes
Value: TRUE

Configure an HTTP proxy

If you use an HTTP proxy for your VMs, run the following commands to set the http_proxy and https_proxy environment variables. To allow the OS Config agent to access the local metadata server, you must configure the no_proxy environment variable to exclude the metadata server (169.254.169.254 and fd20:ce::254).

Linux

On Linux distributions that use systemd, as the root user, add the proxy environment variables to the google-osconfig-agent.service unit:

mkdir -p /etc/systemd/system/google-osconfig-agent.service.d
cat >/etc/systemd/system/google-osconfig-agent.service.d/override.conf <<EOF
[Service]
Environment="http_proxy=http://PROXY_IP:PROXY_PORT" \
  "https_proxy=http://PROXY_IP:PROXY_PORT" \
  "no_proxy=169.254.169.254,fd20:ce::254,metadata,metadata.google.internal"
EOF

Replace PROXY_IP and PROXY_PORTwith the IP address and port number of your proxy server, respectively.

Restart the OS Config agent service:

systemctl daemon-reload
systemctl restart google-osconfig-agent

To confirm that the variables are set correctly, check the environment variables for the running agent:

tr '\0' '\n' < /proc/$(systemctl show -p MainPID --value google-osconfig-agent)/environ

Windows

Run the following commands from an administrator command prompt.

  setx http_proxy http://PROXY_IP:PROXY_PORT /m
  setx https_proxy http://PROXY_IP:PROXY_PORT /m
  setx no_proxy 169.254.169.254,fd20:ce::254,metadata,metadata.google.internal /m

Replace PROXY_IP and PROXY_PORTwith the IP address and port number of your proxy server, respectively.

Google recommends that you exclude *.googleapis.com by adding the no_proxy environment variable to avoid connection issues from the OS Config agent. If you want to connect only specific VMs to the OS Config agent, prefix the zone the VMs are in, and use the format [zone-name]-osconfig.googleapis.com. For example, us-central1-f-osconfig.googleapis.com.

Disable features that you don't need

For features that you might not need, you can disable them by setting the following metadata values: osconfig-disabled-features=FEATURE1,FEATURE2.

Replace FEATURE1,FEATURE2 with any of the following values:

OS inventory management: osinventory
Patch and OS policies: tasks
OS guest policies (beta): guestpolicies

Use one of the following methods to disable the metadata values.

Console

You can disable the metadata values on your Google Cloud projects or VMs by using one of the following options:

Option 1: Disable feature in project-wide metadata so that it applies to all of the instances in your project.
1. In the Google Cloud console, go to the Metadata page.
  
  Go to Metadata
2. Click Edit.
3. Add the following metadata entry:
  
  Key: osconfig-disabled-features
  Value: FEATURE1,FEATURE2
  
  For example:
  Key: osconfig-disabled-features
  Value: osinventory,guestpolicies
4. Click Save to apply the changes.
Option 2: Disable feature in metadata of an existing VM.
1. In the Google Cloud console, go to the VM instances page.
  
  Go to VM instances
2. Click the name of the VM on which you want to set the metadata value.
3. On the Instance details page, click Edit to edit the VM settings.
4. Under Custom metadata, add the following metadata entries:
  
  Key: osconfig-disabled-features
  Value: FEATURE1,FEATURE2
  
  For example:
  Key: osconfig-disabled-features
  Value: osinventory
5. Click Save to apply your changes to the VM.

gcloud

Use the project-info add-metadata or the instances add-metadata gcloud command with the --metadata=osconfig-disabled-features flag.

If you are disabling multiple features, the flag must have the format --metadata=osconfig-disabled-features=FEATURE1,FEATURE2. See example 2.

Examples

Example 1 To disable Patch at the Google Cloud project level using the Google Cloud CLI, run the following command:

gcloud compute project-info add-metadata \
    --project PROJECT_ID \
    --metadata=osconfig-disabled-features=tasks

Example 2 To disable OS policies and OS inventory management at the project level using the Google Cloud CLI, run the following command:

gcloud compute project-info add-metadata \
    --project PROJECT_ID \
    --metadata=osconfig-disabled-features=osinventory,guestpolicies

Replace PROJECT_ID with your project ID.

REST

You can set the metadata value at either the Google Cloud project or instance level.

For instructions on setting project-wide metadata, see setting project-wide custom metadata.
For instructions on setting instance metadata, see setting instance metadata.

The following key-value pair is required as part of the metadata property:

Key: osconfig-disabled-features
Value: Can be any one or a combination of the following flags:
- osinventory
- tasks
- guestpolicies

Requirements for an active OS Config agent

For the OS Config agent to be considered active and billable, it must satisfy all of the following requirements:

VM Manager must be set up.
The VM must be in RUNNING state and the OS Config agent must be communicating with the OS Config service.

If a VM is stopped, suspended, or disconnected from the network, the agent on that VM is not counted as an active agent.

Verify the setup

After completing the setup procedure, you can verify the setup.

View VM Manager feature settings for your project

To verify whether all VM Manager features are enabled in your project, do the following:

gcloud

Use the gcloud compute os-config project-feature-settings describe command as follows:

gcloud compute os-config project-feature-settings describe \
    --project PROJECT_ID

The output of the command is similar to the following:

name: projects/my-project/locations/global/projectFeatureSettings
patchAndConfigFeatureSet: OSCONFIG_C

The value OSCONFIG_C represents the full VM Manager feature set and OSCONFIG_B represents the limited feature set.

REST

To view VM Manager features at the Google Cloud project, create a GET request to the projects.locations.global.getProjectFeatureSettings method.

   GET https://osconfig.googleapis.com/v1/projects/PROJECT_ID/locations/global/projectFeatureSettings

Replace PROJECT_ID with your project ID.

If successful, the method returns the project feature settings as shown in the following example:

{
 "name": "projects/my-project/locations/global/projectFeatureSettings",
 "patchAndConfigFeatureSet": "OSCONFIG_C"
}

The value OSCONFIG_C represents the full VM Manager feature set and OSCONFIG_B represents the limited feature set.

Enable full VM Manager functionality

If VM Manager isn't enabled in your project and you install Ops Agent during VM creation, VM Manager is enabled in the limited mode. In this mode, VM Manager offers a subset of features for unlimited number of VMs at no cost. For example, you can view the OS policy assignments for your VMs on the OS policies page, but you cannot create or edit OS policy assignments.

To enable all VM Manager features for these VMs with Ops Agent installed, do the following:

Console

In the Google Cloud console, go to the OS policies page.

Go to OS policies

Click Enable full VM Manager functionality to enable all VM Manager features.

Note: If you want to enable VM Manager for all VMs in your project, set the enable-osconfig project-wide metadata to true. For more information, see Set the metadata values.

gcloud

To enable all VM Manager features for the Google Cloud project, use the gcloud compute os-config project-feature-settings update command:

gcloud compute os-config project-feature-settings update \
    --project PROJECT_ID \
    --patch-and-config-feature-set=full

REST

To enable all VM Manager features at the Google Cloud project level, send a PATCH request to the projects.locations.global.updateProjectFeatureSettings method.

   PATCH https://osconfig.googleapis.com/v1/projects/PROJECT_ID/locations/global/projectFeatureSettings
   {
     "name": "projects/PROJECT_ID/locations/global/projectFeatureSettings",
     "patchAndConfigFeatureSet": "OSCONFIG_C"
   }

Replace PROJECT_ID with your project ID. The value OSCONFIG_C represents the full VM Manager feature set.

Disable the OS Config agent

Disabling the OS Config agent does not affect the behavior of your VM. You can disable the agent the same way you stop other services of the operating system.

Linux

To disable the agent using systemctl, run the following commands:

sudo systemctl stop google-osconfig-agent
sudo systemctl disable google-osconfig-agent

Windows

To disable the agent using powershell, run the following command:

PowerShell Stop-Service google_osconfig_agent [-StartupType disabled]

What's next?

Except as otherwise noted, the content of this page is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License, and code samples are licensed under the Apache 2.0 License. For details, see the Google Developers Site Policies. Java is a registered trademark of Oracle and/or its affiliates.

Last updated 2026-06-09 UTC.

Set up VM Manager Stay organized with collections Save and categorize content based on your preferences.

Before you begin

Console

gcloud

REST

Supported operating systems

Enable the OS Config service API

Required roles

Enable OS Config API for a single project

Console

gcloud

Enable OS Config API for multiple projects

Required roles

Required permissions

Folder

Organization

Set the VM Manager metadata by using an organization policy

Enable OS Config organization policy

Permissions required for this task

Console

gcloud

Enable VM Manager in a project

Manual

Automatic

Check if the OS Config agent is installed

Linux

Windows

Install the OS Config agent

Install the agent manually

Windows Server

Ubuntu

Debian

Debian 13 and later

Debian 12 and earlier

RHEL/CentOS/Rocky

SLES/openSUSE

Install the agent using a startup script

Set the metadata values

Console

gcloud

REST

Configure an HTTP proxy

Linux

Windows

Disable features that you don't need

Console

gcloud

REST

Requirements for an active OS Config agent

Verify the setup

View VM Manager feature settings for your project

gcloud

REST

Enable full VM Manager functionality

Console

gcloud

REST

Disable the OS Config agent

Linux

Windows

What's next?