Last year, Google acquired the cloud monitoring service Stackdriver. Within weeks, Google had launched a private beta of its own cloud monitoring service based on Stackdriver’s technology and now — eight months later — everybody on Google’s Cloud Platform can finally use this new service.
As the name implies, Google Cloud Monitoring lets developers access performance metrics, capacity and uptime data for their apps that use Google App Engine, Compute Engine, Cloud Pub/Sub and Cloud SQL. It can also monitor many of the popular open source applications that run on top of these services, including MySQL, Nginx, Apache, MongoDB, RabbitMQ and others. When things go awry (or your applications simply exceed whatever threshold you set), Cloud Monitoring can send alerts via email, SMS and PagerDuty, or to your Slack, Campfire or HipChat rooms. Developers can also publish their own custom metrics to Google’s APIs to combine those with the data they get from Cloud Monitoring.
Google says it’s still working to bring more of Stackdriver’s service to Cloud Monitoring, so over time, the service will be able to monitor more of Google’s cloud computing products, too. For now, the service is available in beta, which means there is no SLA or depreciation policy for the time being. With CloudWatch and Azure’s built-in monitoring services, both Amazon and Microsoft currently offer similar tools for the developers on their platforms — likely to the detriment of the numerous third-party cloud monitoring services out there.
It’s worth noting that Stackdriver — which mostly focused on supporting clients on Amazon Web Services before the acquistion — is still online and Google says it will continue to invest in the product while integrating its services into its Cloud Platform.
Today’s news comes a week after Google announced its beta of Cloud Trace, a related service that helps developers find performance issues in their production applications.
