Status of the topic - gmail-api

Question

I have watch/subscribed to the topic using the following code.
request = {
'labelIds': ['INBOX'],
'topicName': 'projects/myproject/topics/mytopic'
}
gmail.users().watch(userId='me', body=request).execute()
How can I get the status of the topic at any given point in time? The problem is, sometimes I am not getting the push from Gmail for any incoming emails.

Answer 1

From the Cloud Pub/Sub perspective, if you want to check on the status of messages, you could look at metrics via Stackdriver. There are many Cloud Pub/Sub metrics that are available. You can create graphs on any of the metrics that will be mentioned later by going to Stackdriver, creating a new dashboard, clicking on "Add Chart," and then typing in the name of the metric in the "Find resource type and metric box:
The first thing you have to determine is whether the issue is on the publish side (from Gmail into your topic) or on the subscribe side (from the subscription to your push endpoint). To determine if the topic is receiving messages, look at the topic/send_message_operation_count metric. This should be non-zero at points where messages were sent from Gmail to the topic. If it is always zero, then it is likely that the connection from Gmail to Cloud Pub/Sub is not set up properly, e.g., you need to grant publish rights to the topic. Note that results are delayed, so from the time you expect a message to have been sent to when it would be reflected on the graph could be up to 5 minutes.
If the messages are successfully being sent to Pub/Sub, then you'll want to see the status of attempts to receive those messages. If your subscription is a push subscription, then you'll want to look at subscription/push_request_count for the subscription. Results are grouped by response code. If the responses are in the 400 or 500 ranges, then Cloud Pub/Sub is attempting to deliver messages to your subscriber, but the subscriber is returning errors. In this case, it is likely an issue with your subscriber itself.
If you are using the Cloud Pub/Sub client libraries, then you'll want to look at properties like subscription/streaming_pull_message_operation_count to determine if your subscriber is managing to try to fetch messages for a subscription. If you are calling the pull method directly in your subscriber, then you'll want to look at subscription/pull_message_operation_count to see if there are pull requests returning successfully to your subscriber.
If the metrics for push, pull, or streaming pull indicate errors, that should help to narrow down the problem. If there are no requests at all, then it indicates that the subscribers may not There could be permission problems, e.g., the subscriber is running as a user that doesn't have permission to read from subscriptions.