Google Cloud Monitoring
Application performance monitoring (APM) tools
Cloud infrastructure monitoring software
Monitoring software
- Features
- Ease of use
- Ease of management
- Quality of support
- Affordability
- Market presence
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Pay-as-you-go
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Free version
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What is Google Cloud Monitoring
Google Cloud Monitoring is a cloud monitoring service within the Google Cloud Observability suite that collects metrics and uptime/health signals for cloud resources, applications, and services. It is used by SRE, DevOps, and platform teams to monitor Google Cloud, Kubernetes, and hybrid/multi-cloud environments via agents and integrations. The product emphasizes metric-based monitoring, alerting policies, dashboards, and SLO monitoring, with tight integration into Google Cloud services and IAM-based access control.
Deep Google Cloud integration
It integrates natively with many Google Cloud services, providing out-of-the-box metrics and resource context without extensive manual instrumentation. IAM and Google Cloud project structure map directly to monitoring access control and scoping. This reduces setup effort for teams primarily operating on Google Cloud compared with more vendor-agnostic stacks.
Strong metrics and alerting
It supports metric collection, label-based filtering, and alerting policies with notification channels and incident workflows. Dashboards and charting are designed for infrastructure and service-level monitoring use cases. SLO monitoring features help teams track error budgets and service objectives using metric-based signals.
Kubernetes and hybrid support
It supports Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) monitoring and can ingest metrics from Kubernetes and VM agents. The platform can monitor workloads beyond Google Cloud through agents and supported integrations, enabling hybrid visibility. This is useful for organizations standardizing on a single monitoring plane while running mixed environments.
APM depth varies by stack
While it covers infrastructure metrics and basic service monitoring well, application performance monitoring capabilities can be less comprehensive than specialized APM-focused tools for some languages and frameworks. Distributed tracing and log correlation often require additional configuration and adjacent Google Cloud services. Teams seeking advanced code-level diagnostics may need complementary tooling.
Cost and quota complexity
Pricing depends on data volume (metrics, logs, traces) and retention, which can be difficult to predict as telemetry grows. Quotas, sampling decisions, and cardinality management require ongoing governance to control spend. Organizations may need dedicated operational practices to avoid unexpected monitoring costs.
Portability and lock-in concerns
The strongest experience is tied to Google Cloud resource models, permissions, and service integrations. Moving dashboards, alert logic, and operational workflows to another platform can require rework. Multi-cloud teams may find the operational model less portable than solutions designed primarily for cross-provider neutrality.
Plan & Pricing
Pricing model: Pay-as-you-go
Free tier/trial:
- Free monthly allotments exist on the official pricing page (e.g., first 150 MiB per billing account for metrics charged by bytes ingested; first 1 million Read API calls / time series returned per billing account; 1 million uptime-check executions per project; 100 synthetic monitor executions per billing account; first 2.5 million Trace spans per billing account). No product-specific, time-limited “trial” is stated on the Cloud Monitoring pricing page.
Example costs:
- All Monitoring data (byte-based ingestion, excluding Google Cloud Managed Service for Prometheus):
- $0.2580 per MiB — first tier.
- $0.1510 per MiB — next tier (100,000–250,000 MiB).
- $0.0610 per MiB — >250,000 MiB.
- Metrics ingested by Google Cloud Managed Service for Prometheus (sample-based):
- $0.06 per million samples — first 0–50 billion samples ingested.
- $0.048 per million samples — next 50–250 billion samples.
- $0.036 per million samples — next 250–500 billion samples.
- $0.024 per million samples — >500 billion samples.
- Monitoring API (read) calls / time series returned:
- Read API calls are charged by the number of time series returned: $0.50 per million time series returned (first 1 million time series returned per billing account free). Note: prior to Oct 2, 2025 Google charged read API calls at $0.01/1,000 read API calls (this is listed on the page with effective dates).
- Uptime checks: $0.30 per 1,000 executions (1 million executions per Google Cloud project free).
- Synthetic monitors: $1.20 per 1,000 executions (100 executions per billing account free).
- Alerting policies (announced to start no sooner than May 1, 2026): $0.10 per month per alert condition; $0.35 per 1,000,000 time series returned by metric alerting policy condition.
Discount options:
- Google Cloud list SKUs and supports contract/commitment discounts via Cloud Billing (contact sales / request a quote).
Seller details
Google LLC
Mountain View, CA, USA
1998
Subsidiary
https://cloud.google.com/deep-learning-vm
https://x.com/googlecloud
https://www.linkedin.com/company/google/
