Observability: cloud monitoring and logging

Google Cloud's Observability

Integrated monitoring, logging, and trace managed services for applications and systems running on Google Cloud and beyond.

Research shows successful reliability is 4.1 times more likely to incorporate observability
Learn how Google Cloud’s Observability helps customers improve cloud observability

Cloud Logging process flow. Check marks with fully managed and scalable,

Key features

Real-time log management and analysis

Cloud Logging is a fully managed service that performs at scale and can ingest application and platform log data, as well as custom log data from GKE environments, VMs, and other services inside and outside of Google Cloud. Get advanced performance, troubleshooting, security, and business insights with Log Analytics, integrating the power of BigQuery into Cloud Logging.

Built-in metrics observability at scale

Cloud Monitoring provides visibility into the performance, uptime, and overall health of cloud-powered applications. Collect metrics, events, and metadata from Google Cloud services, hosted uptime probes, application instrumentation, and a variety of common application components. Visualize this data on charts and dashboards and create alerts so you are notified when metrics are outside of expected ranges.

Stand-alone managed service for running and scaling Prometheus

Managed Service for Prometheus is a fully managed Prometheus-compatible monitoring solution, built on top of the same globally scalable data store as Cloud Monitoring. Keep your existing visualization, analysis, and alerting services, as this data can be queried with PromQL or Cloud Monitoring.

Monitor and improve your application's performance

Application Performance Management (APM) combines the monitoring and troubleshooting capabilities of Cloud Logging and Cloud Monitoring with Cloud Trace and Cloud Profiler to help you reduce latency and cost so you can run more efficient applications.

Customers

Learn from customers using operations tools

What's new

Documentation

Observability documentation

View all documentation for the Observability.

Get started with Cloud Monitoring

Learn about metrics scopes, the monitoring agent, uptime checks, and other features.

Get started with Cloud Logging

Guides and set-up docs to help you get up and running with Cloud Logging.

Monitoring and logging support for GKE

Learn about Google Kubernetes Engine’s native integration with Cloud Monitoring and Cloud Logging.

Google Cloud metrics

See which metrics Cloud Monitoring supports.

Hands-on labs: Google Cloud’s Observability

In this skill badge, you’ll learn the ins and outs of Google Cloud's Observability to generate insights into the health of your applications.

Dashboard API: Build your own Cloud Monitoring dashboard

Tips for shareable and reusable dashboard creation.

Cloud Audit Logs

Learn how Cloud Audit Logs maintains three audit logs: admin activity, data access, and system event.

Hybrid and multi-cloud deployments

This document discusses monitoring and logging architectures for hybrid and multi-cloud deployments.

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Use cases

Monitor your infrastructure

Cloud Logging and Cloud Monitoring provide your IT Ops/SRE/DevOps teams with out-of-the box observability needed to monitor your infrastructure and applications. Cloud Logging automatically ingests Google Cloud audit and platform logs so that you can get started right away. Cloud Monitoring provides a view of all Google Cloud metrics at zero cost and integrates with a variety of providers for non Google Cloud monitoring.

On left, Cloud Logging flows to 3 boxes: 1) “Log Viewer: View, query, and analyze logs box” 2) “Create log-based metrics and set up alerts” 3) “Long Sinks: Manage retention and set up policies.” On right, Cloud Monitoring flows into 3 boxes: 1) “Charts and dashboards” 2) “Alerts and notifications” 3) “SLO monitoring and uptime checks”

Troubleshoot your applications

Reduce Mean Time to Recover (MTTR) and optimize your application’s performance with the full suite of cloud ops tools. Use dashboards to gain insights into your applications with both service and custom application metrics. Use Monitoring SLOs and alerting to help identify errors.

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Step-by-step guide

Reference architecture

Available pre-built solutions

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All features

Log management	Log Router allows customers to control where logs are sent. All logs, including audit logs, platform logs, and user logs, are sent to the Cloud Logging API where they pass through the log router. The log router checks each log entry against existing rules to determine which log entries to discard, which to ingest, and which to include in exports.
Proactive monitoring	Cloud Monitoring allows you to create alerting policies to notify you when metrics, health check results, and uptime check results meet specified criteria. Integrated with a wide variety of notification channels, including Slack and PagerDuty.
Prometheus as a managed service	Offload the scaling and management of Prometheus infrastructure, updates, storage, and more with Managed Service for Prometheus. Avoid vendor lock-in and keep all of the open source tools you use today for visualization, alerting, and analysis of Prometheus metrics.
Custom visualization	Cloud Monitoring provides default out-of-the-box dashboards and allows you to define custom dashboards with powerful visualization tools to suit your needs.
Health check monitoring	Cloud Monitoring provides uptime checks to web applications and other internet-accessible services running on your cloud environment. You can configure uptime checks associated with URLs, groups, or resources, such as instances and load balancers.
Service monitoring	Service monitoring provides out-of-the-box telemetry and dashboards that allow troubleshooting in context through topology and context graphs, plus automation of health monitoring through SLOs and error budget management.
Latency management	Cloud Trace provides latency sampling and reporting for App Engine, including per-URL statistics and latency distributions.
Performance and cost management	Cloud Profiler provides continuous profiling of resource consumption in your production applications, helping you identify and eliminate potential performance issues.
Security management	Cloud Audit Logs provides near real-time user activity visibility across Google Cloud.

Pricing

The pricing for Google Cloud's Observability lets you control your usage and spending. Google Cloud's Observability products are priced by data volume or usage. You can use the free data usage allotments to get started with no upfront fees or commitments.

Cloud Logging

Feature	Price	Free allotment per month	Effective date
Logging storage¹	$0.50/GiB; One-time charge for streaming logs into log bucket storage for indexing, querying, and analysis; includes up to 30 days of storage in log buckets. No additional charges for querying and analyzing log data.	First 50 GiB/project/month	July 1, 2018
Logging retention²	$0.01 per GiB per month for logs retained more than 30 days; billed monthly according to retention.	Logs retained for the default retention period don't incur a retention cost.	April 1, 2023
Log Router³	No additional charge	Not applicable	Not applicable
Log Analytics⁴	No additional charge	Not applicable	Not applicable

Cloud Monitoring

Feature	Price	Free allotment per month	Effective date
All Monitoring data except data ingested by using Managed Service for Prometheus	$0.2580/MiB⁶: first 150–100,000 MiB $0.1510/MiB: next 100,000–250,000 MiB $0.0610/MiB: >250,000 MiB	All non-chargeable Google Cloud metrics First 150 MiB per billing account for metrics charged by bytes ingested	July 1, 2018
Metrics ingested by using Google Cloud Managed Service for Prometheus, including GKE control plane metrics	$0.060/million samples^†: first 0-50 billion samples ingested^# $0.048/million samples: next 50-250 billion samples ingested $0.036/million samples: next 250-500 billion samples ingested $0.024/million samples: >500 billion samples ingested	Not applicable	August 8, 2023
Monitoring API calls	$0.01/1,000 Read API calls (Write API calls are free)	First one million Read API calls included per billing account	July 1, 2018
Execution of Monitoring uptime checks	$0.30/1,000 executions^‡	One million executions per Google Cloud project	October 1, 2022
Execution of Monitoring synthetic monitors	$1.20/1,000 executions^*	100 executions per billing account	November 1, 2023
Alerting policies	$1.50 per month for each condition in an alerting policy $0.35 per 1,000,000 time series returned by the query of a metric alerting policy condition♣	Not applicable	January 7, 2025

Cloud Trace

Feature	Price	Free allotment per month	Effective date
Trace ingestion	$0.20/million spans	First 2.5 million spans	November 1, 2018

¹Storage volume counts the actual size of the log entries prior to indexing. There are no storage charges for logs stored in the Required log bucket.

²There are no retention charges for logs stored in the _Required log bucket, which has a fixed retention period of 400 days.

³Log routing is defined as forwarding received logs to a supported destination. Destination charges might apply to routed logs.

⁴There is no charge to upgrade a log bucket to use Log Analytics or to issue SQL queries from the Log Analytics page.

Note: The pricing language for Cloud Logging changed on July 19, 2023; however, the free allotments and the rates haven't changed. Your bill might refer to the old pricing language.

⁶For pricing purposes, all units are treated as binary measures, for example, as mebibytes (MiB, or 2²⁰ bytes) or gibibytes (GiB, or 2³⁰ bytes).

^† Google Cloud Managed Service for Prometheus uses Cloud Monitoring storage for externally created metric data and uses the Monitoring API to retrieve that data. Managed Service for Prometheus meters based on samples ingested instead of bytes to align with Prometheus' conventions. For more information about sample-based metering, see Pricing for controllability and predictability. For computational examples, see Pricing examples based on samples ingested.

^# Samples are counted per billing account.

^‡ Executions are charged to the billing account in which they are defined. For more information, see Pricing for uptime-check execution.

^* Executions are charged to the billing account in which they are defined. For each execution, you might incur additional charges from other Google Cloud services, including services, such as Cloud Functions, Cloud Storage, and Cloud Logging. For information about these additional charges, see the pricing document for the respective Google Cloud service.

♣ For more information, see Pricing for alerting.

Partners

Get support from a rich and growing ecosystem of technology integrations to expand the IT ops, security, and compliance capabilities available to Google Cloud customers.

Featured partners

Partner integrations

Bindplane is a registered trademark of observIQ, Inc.

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