Eight months ago, we welcomed Stackdriver to the Google family. We announced Stackdriver’s initial Google Cloud Platform integration at Google I/O in June 2014 and made the service available to a limited set of alpha users. Since then, the team has been working to make operations easier for Google Cloud Platform and Amazon Web Services customers, and hundreds of companies are now using the service for that purpose.

Today, we’re pleased to announce the beta availability of Google Cloud Monitoring. All Google Cloud Platform customers can now use Cloud Monitoring to gain insight into the performance, capacity and uptime of Google App Engine, Google Compute Engine, Cloud Pub/Sub, and Cloud SQL.

Cloud Monitoring streamlines operations by unifying infrastructure monitoring, system/OS monitoring, service/uptime monitoring, charting and alerting into a simple and powerful hosted service. Customers can use Cloud Monitoring to gain insight into:

  • Overall Health: Use resource groups to create aggregate views of your key environments and systems. Incorporate application or business statistics using custom metrics. Create and share custom dashboards to provide your team with a unified perspective.
  • Usage: Get core metrics and dashboards to understand capacity and utilization of Google Cloud Platform services.
  • Uptime: Configure endpoint checks to test functionality and notify team members when web servers, APIs, and other Internet-facing resources become unavailable for end users.
  • Performance: View latency, error rates and other key metrics for Google Cloud Platform services, and common web/application serving, database, messaging and load balancing platforms. Configure alerting policies to be notified when metrics are outside of acceptable ranges.
  • Incidents: Receive notifications via multiple communication channels when alerting policies are violated.

Key Features

The Cloud Monitoring Console provides a high-level overview of the health and key metrics for your environment.
Cloud Monitoring Console
You can configure alerts to notify your team when specified conditions are met, such as when the request latency for your App Engine module exceeds a certain threshold. These alerts can be configured to notify you via email, SMS, PagerDuty, Campfire, Slack, HipChat and webhook.
Alerting Configuration for Response Latency
You can also configure endpoint checks to notify you when web servers, APIs and other Internet-facing resources are unavailable for your end users.
Endpoint Check Status
Cloud Monitoring features native integration with common open source services, such as MySQL, Nginx, Apache, MongoDB, RabbitMQ and many more. For example, you can use our Cassandra plugin to gain deep visibility into the performance of your distributed key value store.
Cassandra Performance Dashboard
You can also tailor Cloud Monitoring to suit your needs: you can publish custom metrics to our API and bring them together with system and infrastructure metrics on custom dashboards.
Custom Metrics on Custom Dashboard
We’re working to integrate the rest of the Stackdriver technology into Cloud Monitoring with the goal of providing a unified monitoring solution for Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services and hybridcustomers. We’ll continue to extend our support for each of these platforms. We’re also working to integrate Cloud Monitoring and Cloud Logging more deeply to simplify root cause analysis for issues.

Getting Started

 If you are a current Google Cloud Platform user or you sign up for a free trial, you can try Cloud Monitoring today for free.

For more information, please visit the Cloud Monitoring home page; and we would love to hear your feedback.

- Posted by Dan Belcher, Product Manager