To use a Stackdriver, you just need a GCP account. If you have never used GCP, please go back and read Chapter 7, Building Kubernetes on GCP, to set up a GCP account and the gcloud command-line interface.

To use Stackdriver on GKE, no action is needed, because GKE uses Stackdriver as a logging platform by default. But if you want to explicitly enable Stackdriver, specify --enable-cloud-logging while launching your Kubernetes by using the gcloud command, as follows:

$ gcloud container clusters create my-gke --cluster-version 1.9.4-gke.1 --enable-cloud-logging --network default --zone us-west1-b

If, for some reason, you have a GKE that doesn't enable Stackdriver, you can use the gcloud command to enable it afterwards: 

$ gcloud container clusters update my-gke --logging-service logging.googleapis.com --zone us-west1-b