Google Cloud Operations Suite
By Google Cloud
Google Cloud Operations Suite (formerly Stackdriver) is Google Cloud's integrated set of monitoring, logging, and tracing tools that gives teams visibility into the health, performance, and behavior of applications and infrastructure…
Definition
Google Cloud Operations Suite (formerly Stackdriver) is Google Cloud's integrated set of monitoring, logging, and tracing tools that gives teams visibility into the health, performance, and behavior of applications and infrastructure running on Google Cloud.
Overview
Operations Suite bundles several previously separate products — Cloud Monitoring, Cloud Logging, Cloud Trace, Cloud Profiler, and Error Reporting — under one banner, playing the same role for Google Cloud that AWS CloudWatch plays for AWS and Azure Monitor plays for Azure. It was previously known as Stackdriver, a name still referenced in some documentation and client libraries. Cloud Monitoring collects metrics from Google Cloud services and custom application instrumentation, and lets teams build dashboards and alerting policies on top of them. Cloud Logging centralizes structured and unstructured logs from GCP resources, Kubernetes workloads, and applications, with support for log-based metrics and export to BigQuery for long-term analysis. Cloud Trace and Cloud Profiler add distributed tracing and continuous CPU/memory profiling respectively, which is particularly useful for diagnosing latency and performance issues in microservices running on GKE or Cloud Run. Because Operations Suite is built on OpenTelemetry-compatible APIs, it integrates reasonably well with third-party observability tools, and Google Cloud has increasingly aligned its tracing and metrics APIs with the broader OpenTelemetry ecosystem rather than keeping them fully proprietary.
Key Features
- Cloud Monitoring for metrics collection, dashboards, and alerting policies
- Cloud Logging for centralized structured and unstructured log storage and search
- Cloud Trace for distributed tracing of latency across microservices
- Cloud Profiler for continuous production performance profiling
- Error Reporting for automatic aggregation and alerting on application exceptions
- Uptime checks and synthetic monitoring for external endpoint availability
- OpenTelemetry-compatible APIs for interoperability with third-party tools
Use Cases
Frequently Asked Questions
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