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Opal lets your developers find and request access to SSH into GCP Compute instances. Use the following steps to add Compute instances to your Opal dashboard.

1. Set up OS Login on the VM Instance

Follow Steps 1 and 3 in the following guide. By the end of it, you should have added the enable-oslogin key with value TRUE in the VM instance metadata.

2. Configure osLoginExternalUser for users

This step is optional and only applies to Opal users who you want to grant GCP Compute instance access and who are outside of your Google Cloud organization. Read this guide to enable osLoginExternalUser for a user. The user email must correspond to the Opal user’s email.

3. Grant the compute.Viewer permission for users

The Opal user who you want to grant access to needs the compute.Viewer permission on the Project to be able to find and SSH into the instance. This can be done via the following: First, import the GCP Project corresponding to the Compute instance in Opal. Go to the Inventory, then your Google Cloud App, then on the Assets tab select Import assets. There you can import your GCP Project as a Resource. 2312 Go to the Project resource you just added and select the User Access tab. You can click +Add Users on the right to browse and select a user to add to the project with the compute.Viewer role. 463

4. Grant the compute.OsLogin permission

First, import the Compute instance into Opal. Go to the Inventory, then your Google Cloud App, then on the Assets tab select Import assets. There you can filter by type GCP Compute and import your Compute instance as a Resource. 463 Next, go to Resources on the left sidebar, then to the Compute resource you just added, and select the User Access tab of the resource. Add the user to the Compute instance with the compute.OsLogin access level. If no choice to set the access level is presented, add the user without specifying the access level.

5. If needed, install gcloud

Install the gcloud binary, as described in this guide. This command will be used to SSH into the instance.

6. Log in to gcloud

The user who was granted permission must perform gcloud auth login in the shell, logging in with an email matching the Opal user.

7. SSH into the VM instance

A couple minutes or so after the user was granted the compute.OsLogin permission, the user should be able to SSH into the instance with a command of the form: gcloud compute ssh --project=PROJECT_ID --zone=ZONE_ID COMPUTE_INSTANCE_NAME. For example, gcloud compute ssh --project=my-project --zone=us-central1-a my-compute-instance.
Last modified on November 9, 2026