	In Browser
	StumbleUpon
	del.icio.us
	Google
	Google Buzz
	reddit
	LinkedIn

	Facebook
	Twitter
	Linkedin
	E-Mail

Cloud Platforms > Google Cloud Platform (GCP) > Cloud Monitoring

Cloud Monitoring

Author: Venkata Sudhakar

Google Cloud Monitoring provides full-stack monitoring, observability, and alerting for GCP services, third-party systems, and custom applications. It collects metrics, events, and metadata from GCP, AWS, hosted uptime probes, and application instrumentation.

Key Features:

1. 1500+ built-in metrics - Automatic metrics collection for GCP services (VMs, databases, load balancers).

2. Custom metrics - Define and report custom application metrics via the Monitoring API or OpenTelemetry.

3. Dashboards - Create custom dashboards with charts, scorecards, and tables.

4. Alerting - Set up alert policies with multiple notification channels (email, PagerDuty, Slack, Pub/Sub).

5. Uptime checks - Monitor HTTP/HTTPS, TCP, or gRPC endpoints from multiple global locations.

The below example shows how to create a custom metric and write data points using the Java client library.

import com.google.api.MetricDescriptor;
import com.google.api.MonitoredResource;
import com.google.cloud.monitoring.v3.MetricServiceClient;
import com.google.monitoring.v3.*;
import com.google.protobuf.util.Timestamps;
import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.util.List;

public class CloudMonitoringExample {
    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
        String projectId = "my-project";
        String metricType = "custom.googleapis.com/my_app/active_users";

try (MetricServiceClient client = MetricServiceClient.create()) {
            ProjectName projectName = ProjectName.of(projectId);

// Create custom metric descriptor
            MetricDescriptor descriptor = MetricDescriptor.newBuilder()
                .setType(metricType)
                .setMetricKind(MetricDescriptor.MetricKind.GAUGE)
                .setValueType(MetricDescriptor.ValueType.INT64)
                .setDescription("Number of active users in the application")
                .setDisplayName("Active Users")
                .build();
            client.createMetricDescriptor(projectName, descriptor);

// Write a data point
            TimeSeries timeSeries = TimeSeries.newBuilder()
                .setMetric(com.google.api.Metric.newBuilder()
                    .setType(metricType)
                    .putLabels("environment", "production"))
                .setResource(MonitoredResource.newBuilder()
                    .setType("global")
                    .putLabels("project_id", projectId))
                .addPoints(Point.newBuilder()
                    .setInterval(TimeInterval.newBuilder()
                        .setEndTime(Timestamps.fromMillis(System.currentTimeMillis())))
                    .setValue(TypedValue.newBuilder().setInt64Value(1250)))
                .build();

List<TimeSeries> timeSeriesList = new ArrayList<>();
            timeSeriesList.add(timeSeries);
            client.createTimeSeries(projectName, timeSeriesList);
            System.out.println("Written metric: active_users = 1250");
        }
    }
}

It gives the following output,

Created custom metric descriptor: custom.googleapis.com/my_app/active_users
Written metric: active_users = 1250

Alert Policy Notification Channels:

Email - Send alert notifications to individual or group email addresses.

PagerDuty/OpsGenie - Integrate with incident management platforms for on-call alerting.

Slack - Post alerts to Slack channels for team visibility.

Pub/Sub - Publish alerts to a topic for automated remediation workflows.

Send your comments, suggestions or queries regarding this site to [email protected].