What approach helps minimize manual intervention when maintaining a production service on Compute Engine?

Creating a Managed Instance Group using health checks is an effective approach for minimizing manual intervention in maintaining a production service on Compute Engine.

Managed Instance Groups (MIGs) allow you to automate the deployment, scaling, and management of virtual machine instances. By utilizing health checks, a MIG can automatically monitor the health of its instances. If an instance becomes unhealthy or unresponsive, the Managed Instance Group can automatically replace it with a new instance without requiring any manual intervention. This self-healing capability ensures that your service remains highly available and resilient, even in the face of potential failures.

In contrast, while creating a Cloud Monitoring dashboard for alerts provides visibility into the performance and health of your service, it still requires manual action to address any issues that arise. Filing a bug report with development is a reactive approach that does not aid in maintaining the service but rather addresses problems after they are identified. Adding a Load Balancer can help distribute traffic effectively but does not inherently automate instance management or recovery from failures. Thus, the use of a Managed Instance Group with health checks is the most proactive strategy in this context, reducing the need for manual oversight and ensuring seamless service operation.