GCP compute engine: how to check instance type (custom Linux) from the instance terminal?

Question

I have custom Linux that I can boot up on AWS and GCP. In AWS I can check EC2 instance type easily from terminal:

aws-instance-xyz:/ # dmidecode -s system-product-name
m6i.4xlarge

I would like to be able to check instance type of compute engine in GCP however dmidecode command is of no use here:

gcp-instance-xyz:/ # dmidecode -s system-product-name
Google Compute Engine

I have to be able to check the instance type using a command in terminal. I can't install GCP cli on that linux environment so any gcloud/gutils commands are not an option.

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered May 25 '23 at 11:50

1

As per this official doc sudo dmidecode -s system-product-name is used to detect if the VM is running in Compute Engine.

To get the metadata details you need to use the curl command as mentioned in this official doc.Use the below command to get instance type:

curl "http://metadata.google.internal/computeMetadata/v1/instance/machine-type" -H "Metadata-Flavor: Google"

Output:

It will be flexible if you use gcloud and adding here the installation document for your reference.

answered May 25 '23 at 11:50

Sai Chandra Gadde

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I know about the curl option but I hoped there is another solution for that. – pykaczka May 25 '23 at 12:36
Other options are using gcloud only as per document. – Sai Chandra Gadde May 25 '23 at 13:05
@pykaczka - write a simple Python script to fetch the machine-type. Now that you know how there are endless possibilities. – John Hanley May 25 '23 at 21:41

GCP compute engine: how to check instance type (custom Linux) from the instance terminal?

1 Answers1