What is Cloud Monitoring?
Cloud Monitoring is Google Cloud’s central observability platform. The service collects metrics, creates dashboards, and triggers alerts to ensure the availability and performance of cloud applications. Cloud Monitoring is part of the Google Cloud Operations Suite.
Core Features
- Automatic metric collection from all Google Cloud services
- Custom dashboards with drag-and-drop editor
- Uptime checks for HTTP(S), TCP, and ICMP
- Alerting with flexible notification channels
- Service Level Objectives for SLO-based monitoring
Typical Use Cases
Infrastructure Monitoring: Monitor CPU, memory, disk, and network for Compute Engine, GKE, and Cloud Run. Automatic alerts for capacity constraints.
Application Performance: Application performance monitoring with custom metrics and integration with Cloud Trace for end-to-end latency analysis.
SRE Workflows: Service Level Objectives define acceptable performance boundaries. Error budgets show how much room remains for deployments.
Benefits
- No agents required on Google Cloud resources
- First 150 MB of metrics per month free
- Integration with Cloud Logging and Cloud Trace
- Prometheus-compatible for multi-cloud monitoring
Integration with innFactory
As a Google Cloud Partner, innFactory supports you with Cloud Monitoring: dashboard design, alerting strategies, SLO definition, and cost optimization.
Available Tiers & Options
Standard
- Fully managed
- Scalable
- Integrated with GCP
- Pricing varies by usage
Typical Use Cases
Technical Specifications
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Cloud Monitoring?
Cloud Monitoring is Google's fully managed monitoring platform that provides metrics, dashboards, and alerting for cloud infrastructure and applications. The service automatically collects metrics from all Google Cloud services.
What metrics are automatically collected?
Cloud Monitoring automatically captures over 1,500 metrics from Google Cloud services such as CPU utilization, network traffic, disk I/O, and service-specific metrics. Additionally, custom metrics can be sent via APIs.
How does alerting work?
You define alerting policies based on metric thresholds or absence of data. Notifications can be sent via email, SMS, PagerDuty, Slack, or webhooks.
Is Cloud Monitoring GDPR compliant?
Yes, Cloud Monitoring is available in EU regions and meets all GDPR requirements. Monitoring data can be restricted to EU regions.
