Google Cloud Monitoring
Google Cloud Monitoring tracks the performance, availability, and health of your GCP resources and applications. Collect metrics, build dashboards, and set alerting policies to detect and respond to issues quickly.
▶Architecture Diagram
📊 Data FlowDashed line animations indicate the flow direction of data or requests
Once you deploy a service, you need a way to know if it's healthy, slowing down, or running out of disk space. Finding out after an incident means users have already been affected.
Previously, you had to install monitoring agents like Nagios or Zabbix on each server and configure them manually. As cloud services started exposing their own metrics natively, integrated monitoring without separate installations became the norm.
Cloud Monitoring automatically collects metrics from GCP services and displays them as time series on dashboards. Alerting policies define conditions (e.g., CPU > 80% for 5+ minutes) that trigger Notification Channels (Slack, email, PagerDuty). Uptime Checks periodically send external requests to your service to verify availability.
Cloud Monitoring and Cloud Logging are both observability tools but serve different purposes. Monitoring collects numeric metrics (CPU, latency, error rates) and sends threshold-based alerts. Logging collects text logs for search and analysis. Metrics tell you 'something is wrong'; logs tell you 'why it's wrong.' They're complementary.
A strong fit for operating production infrastructure, checking service availability, and catching performance anomalies before users notice them. It does not replace the work of reconstructing full request paths or reading long-form event history in detail.