Dataplane version 2 required for BFD check field absence
| Service | Google Cloud Interconnect |
|---|---|
| Cloud | Google Cloud (GCP) |
| Guide type | Procedure |
| Skill level | Intermediate to advanced |
| Time | 15 - 60 minutes depending on account size |
Dataplane version 2 required for BFD check field absence on Google Cloud Interconnect sits in the most-reported issues list across r/aws, Google Cloud Community, and StackOverflow. The recovery path is mostly known, the Google Cloud docs just bury it under three layers of conceptual material.
What dataplane version 2 required for bfd check field absence actually involves on Google Cloud Interconnect
This task on Cloud Interconnect is one of the more searched operational topics on AWS in the last 12 months. The procedure below is the path that works in a current AWS account with default IAM and standard VPC config.
The rest of this page is the structured fix path. Start with diagnose, then remediation, then the automation options so you do not have to do this by hand the next time it surfaces. Verify and safety sections at the end are the discipline that keeps the fix from regressing in production.
Diagnose first, fix second
Pull the Google Cloud request ID from the response headers: x-goog-request-id from response headers (or the insertId field in Cloud Logging for asynchronous calls). Google Cloud Support needs these IDs to look up your call in their internal logs - without them, the first reply on a ticket will ask you to reproduce the call and capture them. Save them with a timestamp; Google Cloud Support cannot retrieve calls older than 90 days for most services.
Diff against last known good. The last config change you made is the cause about three quarters of the time, even when the change should not have mattered. Use Asset Inventory snapshot history (or your Terraform / Deployment Manager or Terraform drift report) to see the actual delta between the resource state when it worked and when it broke. The change you remember is often not the only change that happened.
Check Cloud Monitoring Logs for the calling service. Lambda, ECS, EKS, Step Functions, API Gateway, and most managed services write detailed traces to Cloud Monitoring Logs under predictable log group names. Use Cloud Monitoring Logs Insights with fields @timestamp, @message | filter @message like /ERROR/ | sort @timestamp desc | limit 50 to surface the most recent failures.
Solution-focused remediation path
If the issue points at IAM, do not start by adding * to a policy. Use IAM Policy Troubleshooter and IAM Recommender against the failed action to see the minimum scope. Adding * is the fastest way to fail your next Google Cloud Architecture Framework security review, and it usually does not even fix the issue because the explicit deny is often coming from a higher level (Org Policy, RCP, or permission boundary), not a missing allow.
Most Google Cloud Interconnect failures fall into one of three buckets: IAM permission gap, networking path break (security group, NACL, or VPC endpoint policy), or service-limit / quota hit. Run that mental triage first - it covers around 80 percent of real-world cases. If the failure does not fit any of the three, it is likely a service-side regression worth opening a re:Post or support ticket for.
If networking is suspect, use Network Intelligence Connectivity Tests. It is the only tool that simulates the full ENI-to-ENI path including firewall rules, hierarchical firewall policies, routes, and VPC Service Controls perimeters in one call. Manual trace is slower and misses transitive issues. The analyzer charges $0.10 per analysis - cheaper than a 30-minute call with your network team.
Automate this fix so you do not do it twice
Add a Workflows or Cloud Tasks Automation runbook
For multi-step fixes that include a manual approval, use Workflows runbook. Document the fix as a runbook with workflows.executions.approve steps where a human signs off and workflows.steps.callApi steps where the runbook calls the Google Cloud API. Approvers are notified by SNS; the runbook execution shows up in Cloud Audit Logs with the approver's identity attached. This makes audit trails easy and stops production fixes from being one-person operations.
Wire the fix into Eventarc for self-healing
If the failure mode is recurring, automate the remediation instead of the diagnosis. Eventarc Scheduler or rules that watch Cloud Logging events for the specific error code can invoke a Lambda that runs the same fix you would run by hand. The Lambda must be idempotent (re-running it on already-healthy resources must be a no-op) and must emit a Cloud Monitoring metric so you can track how often the auto-fix fires. A spike in auto-fix invocations is itself a signal worth alerting on.
# Eventarc rule pattern (JSON)
{ "source": ["aws.google"], "detail-type": ["Google Cloud API Call via Cloud Audit Logs"], "detail": { "errorCode": ["AccessDenied", "ThrottlingException"] }
}Add a Cloud Monitoring alert policy so you know next time
The cheapest way to never see the same incident twice is a Cloud Monitoring alert policy on the metric that would have warned you. For Google Cloud Interconnect, the relevant metrics live under compute.googleapis.com/google namespace or under custom metrics published by your Cloud Run service or GKE pod. Set thresholds based on observed normal range plus one or two standard deviations, not on round-number guesses. Cloud Monitoring anomaly-based alert policies remove the threshold-guessing problem entirely for metrics with regular seasonality.
Common pitfalls and what to watch for
The pitfall most teams hit on Google Cloud Interconnect is moving too fast and skipping the read-only validation step. Before any write, list the current state and save it. Google Cloud APIs are eventually consistent for many resource types, so the validation snapshot is your only reliable reference if you need to undo. Save the output of the describe call to S3, not to your laptop.
Second pitfall: confusing IAM permission errors with networking errors. AccessDenied can be IAM (policy missing), networking (VPC endpoint policy blocking the call), or KMS (key policy missing). The error string looks identical for all three. Distinguish by looking at the Cloud Audit Log event's errorCode and the encoded authorization message; do not assume IAM is the culprit just because the message says AccessDenied.
Verify the fix worked
- Reproduce the original symptom path. If it still surfaces in any account or region or IAM role or service account, you have not fixed it.
- Watch for 24 to 48 hours. Cloud Monitoring metrics and Cloud Asset Inventory can mask issues with cached health for 6 to 12 hours, especially Cloud CDN and Cloud DNS.
- Run a smoke test under realistic load. Happy-path tests miss race conditions and IAM session-cache issues.
- Capture the new state in a runbook so the next person on call does not have to rediscover this. Push it to Confluence or your team wiki, not into Slack.
- If the fix involved a permission change, run IAM Access Analyzer one more time to confirm you did not open a separate hole while closing this one.
Safety, rollback, blast radius
- Test in a non-production account if your environment has Resource Manager and Organization Policy or Cloud Resource Manager (organizations, folders, projects). The cost of one sandbox account is cheaper than one rollback meeting.
- Export the existing config before changing it. Most Google Cloud Interconnect resources support describe + export to JSON via CLI - capture that to source control before you start.
- Know your rollback path. Some Google Cloud Interconnect operations are one-way (region migration, account-level feature opt-in, Cloud KMS key deletion past pending window). Confirm reversibility on the Google Cloud doc before you commit.
- Be aware of cross-service impact. IAM role or service account changes ripple to every service trusting that role. Cloud KMS key changes break every workload depending on that key. VPC endpoint changes affect every VPC consumer of that endpoint.
- Maintenance window discipline: if the change touches DNS, certificate rotation, or anything that emits TLS handshakes, line up a window with stakeholder notification, not a heroic mid-day swap.
FAQ
gcloud google describe-... first, then commit it before you change anything. A few operations are one-way (Cloud KMS key deletion past the pending window, region migration, account closure). Check the Google Cloud doc for the specific API before you commit.aws CLI or SDK calls - those almost always still work.References
- docs.cloud.google.com - official documentation for Google Cloud Interconnect
- Google Cloud Community - community Q&A with Google-staff-verified answers
- Cloud Service Health Dashboard at health.cloud.google.com
- Quotas page in Cloud Console (IAM & Admin > Quotas) and Architecture Framework checklists
Related fixes
Related guides worth a look while you sort this one out:
- Policy version 3 required for conditional bindings
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- iam serviceAccounts actAs permission required to deploy as SA
- Required on Cloud IAM, what causes it and how to fix
- BGP session over Interconnect session not establishing