An app runs fine locally but is much slower on a Compute Engine VM. To diagnose where time is spent in the deployed app, what should you do?

Cloud Profiler is the most effective tool here because it directly analyzes the performance of your code by identifying which functions consume the most CPU, memory, or I/O over time. This allows you to pinpoint performance bottlenecks within your application's execution. While Cloud Debugger snapshots can inspect variables and call stacks at a specific point, they don't provide a continuous view of resource consumption across the entire application runtime. Adding logging calls and using Cloud Logging can help identify general areas of latency, but it's more manual and less precise than profiling for pinpointing exact function-level bottlenecks. Filing a Cloud Support ticket is inappropriate as this is an application-level performance issue, not a platform-level problem.