Top 10 Google Cloud Monitoring Tools You Must Know

In this article, we will explore 10 solutions designed to empower businesses and ensure the overall health of your Google Cloud Platform infrastructure…

…with real-time visibility, proactive alerts, and advanced analytics, and show how these monitoring solutions can help you optimize resource utilization, identify bottlenecks, track performance metrics .

• FAQ’s about Google Cloud Monitoring
• Top Google Cloud Monitoring Tools

With a 10% market share, the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is the third-largest cloud infrastructure service provider in the market, behind Microsoft Azure (with 23%) and AWS (with 32%). Still, this is 10% of a market that brought in US$ 63 billion in revenue as of Q1 2023.

GCP offers a range of features from Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) computing resources with the Google Compute Engine (GCE) to cloud storage, load balancing and CDN, Big Data processing, AI tools, IoT management, business applications, and much more.

And as a leading cloud computing solution, monitoring the health and efficiency of your GCP resources has become increasingly crucial. That’s where monitoring tools step in to provide invaluable insights into your cloud environment.

Whether you’re a seasoned GCP user looking to enhance your monitoring strategy or a newcomer seeking guidance, we hope that this article will be an invaluable resource. Join us as we explore 10 of the best GCP monitoring tools.

Frequently Asked Questions About Google Cloud Monitoring

What are Google Cloud Monitoring Tools?

Google Cloud monitoring tools are tools that can be used to monitor the performance and availability of components of the Google Cloud Platform, a suite of cloud computing services offered by Google.

These can range from simple service availability monitors to more sophisticated tools that can deliver deep insight into the performance of your applications and services running or hosted on the GCP.

Keep in mind that the GCP is composed of literally tens of services, and most tools aren’t capable of monitoring every single one of them. However, most support the “core” services, like the Compute Engine, Cloud Storage, Filestore, or Kubernetes Engine. We recommend that you check with the developer of each tool for more information on specific features.

Google offers its own GCP monitoring solution called “Google Cloud Operations“, formerly known as Stackdriver. However, in this article, we are focusing on third-party tools, which may offer features that better integrate with a heterogeneous IT infrastructure, like multi-cloud or hybrid monitoring, application performance monitoring (APM), and more.

Why Should You Invest in Google Cloud Monitoring?

There are many reasons to invest in Google Cloud Monitoring. Here are five of them, in no particular order.

1. Performance optimization: continuous monitoring can help you pinpoint issues and identify opportunities for optimization that will improve the performance of your infrastructure, sometimes without the need for hardware or resource upgrades.

2. Security: monitoring allows you to spot early signs of uncommon behavior or usage patterns indicative of an intrusion attempt or ongoing attack. This will give you time to react and deploy countermeasures before a data breach occurs.

3. Resource allocation: find out where resources are being underutilized or overutilized, allowing you to redistribute them according to real needs to ensure the most effective usage of your systems.

4. Proactive maintenance: monitoring allows you to detect and fix potential issues before they become critical and result in outages that may affect the performance of your applications or even the profitability of your business.

5. Regulatory compliance: businesses that handle sensitive information, like financial or healthcare data, need to meet strict regulatory standards that specify how this information is stored and handled. Monitoring will allow you to prove compliance with these standards and secure approvals that may be crucial to keep your business running.

What to Look for When Choosing Google Cloud Monitoring Tools?

Broadly speaking, there are 5 main features you need to look out for when choosing Google Cloud monitoring tools. Keep in mind that this may vary according to your specific needs.

• The capability to monitor many aspects of your Google Cloud infrastructure at once.
• A centralized display of information from many sensors for better observability.
• Customizable alerts and automated notifications when alerts are triggered.
• Native and automated reporting features, so you can keep co-workers and management “in the loop”.
• A free trial period, so you can attest to how the tool works with your network infrastructure.

How to do Google Cloud Monitoring?

There is no “right” way to do it, as it all depends on your needs. There are many Google Cloud monitoring tools, from as many different vendors, which may focus solely on a single aspect of the task or offer this capability as a subset of a broader range of features. We present a few of them below, in no particular order.

The Best Google Cloud Monitoring Tools

PRTG

Paessler PRTG is the Swiss army knife of the monitoring world. PRTG is based on basic monitoring elements called “sensors”. One sensor usually monitors one measured value in your network, e.g. the traffic of a switch port, the CPU load of a server, the free space of a disk drive, and so on.

PRTG comes with more than 250 built-in sensors for various tasks, device types, and use cases, so you would be hard-pressed to find something you can’t monitor. Plus, you can mix and match sensors, and even deploy custom ones, to create monitoring solutions specific to your needs.

This tool offers “complete control and visibility” of your Google Cloud storage, application workloads, and virtual environment, and allows you to monitor objects in the storage bucket, storage utilization, and change in object size to get a better understanding of your Google Cloud filestore and overall cloud storage. You can also observe how your cloud resources interconnect with other systems and applications and view their dependencies in real-time.

The information gathered by PRTG is shown on a centralized dashboard with all the relevant metrics. You can set alerts based on threshold values, with notifications delivered by text (SMS) or email if those values are exceeded. There is also an automatic reporting feature, so you can keep management and co-workers informed.

PRTG runs on Windows Server 2012 R2, 2016, 2019, 2022, or Windows 11. There is a 30-day free trial of PRTG, with all features available during this period, no credit card is needed.

Site24x7

Site24x7 is an all-in-one monitoring solution with an impressive array of features, including website monitoring, server monitoring, cloud monitoring, network monitoring, application performance monitoring, and real user monitoring, to name a few.

Google Cloud Platform monitoring is one of those features, with auto-discovery and monitoring of the Google Compute Engine (GCE), Google App Engine (GAE), Google Kubernetes Engine, VPC (Virtual Private Cloud), Cloud IAM (Identity and Access Management), Cloud Audit Logging, Cloud SQL, BigQuery, and more.

It can also monitor FaaS (Functions as a Service) platforms like Google Cloud Functions and offers visibility of your entire GCP stack on customizable dashboards that can be shared business-wide and include data across various GCP services. An “AI-Powered performance monitoring” system promises to help you quickly identify the root cause of problems, and you can set automations for incident remediation.

The monitoring agent used by Site24x7 supports Windows Server (versions 2008, 2008 R2, 2012, 2012 R2, 2016, and 2019), Windows 7 or above, all the main Linux distros (Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS, Red Hat, Mandriva, Fedora, SuSE, Amazon Linux, Gentoo, CoreOS, and RancherOS), Docker, FreeBSD (9 or above) and macOS (10 or above). There is a 30-day free trial available.

ManageEngine Applications Manager

The ManageEngine Applications Manager suite of monitoring tools can monitor the health and performance of four services on the Google Cloud Platform: Cloud Filestore, Compute Engine, Kubernetes Engine, and Cloud Storage.

It offers a “holistic” view of your GCP resources, monitoring key metrics such as CPU utilization, memory utilization, network traffic, and pod CPU usage. Root cause analysis tools can help you identify the source of issues, and it is possible to automate corrective actions and alerts via SMS, email, or Slack.

AI-based forecast reports and trend analysis tools, presented as statistical and graphical representations, can help you make educated judgments on resource utilization and future growth, helping you to redistribute resources and even lower service costs associated with underutilized features.

ManageEngine Applications Manager runs on Windows Server 2012 R2, 2016, 2019, 2022, Windows 10 or Windows 11, and also on Linux distributions like CentOS, Debian, Fedora, openSUSE, Oracle Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (7 and 8), SUSE Linux Enterprise and Ubuntu. There is a 30-day free trial available.

Datadog

With support for more than 600 data sources and integrations, Datadog advertises full observability and increased security for your infrastructure, with metrics collected to a granularity down to one-second resolution.

This tool advertises a “comprehensive view into on-premises, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments”, with the capability to track every stage of a Google Cloud Platform migration. Integration with features like Google Cloud Run allows the tracking of dynamic resources on Google Kubernetes Engine or Google Cloud Functions and starts monitoring them as soon as they are created.

All the data is displayed on dashboards that can be configured to “provide stakeholders with a real-time view of their infrastructure health”, with conditional alerting using a combination of metrics, events, and other data points to avoid alert fatigue, and anomaly and outlier detection features to quickly identify and troubleshoot problematic hosts.

Datadog uses agents to collect data, and they are available for Windows, all the main Linux Distributions (such as Ubuntu, SuSE, RHEL, Fedora, CentOS, and Amazon Linux), and even AIX. You can try Datadog free for 14 days, one of the shortest trial periods among the tools listed in this article.

Sematext Cloud Monitoring

As the name implies, Sematext Cloud is a cloud-hosted Software as a Service (SaaS) performance monitoring package that offers “a unified view over server and application metrics, logs, service availability, and performance.”

Sematext can monitor private, public, and hybrid cloud services, with easy integration and automatic discovery of container platforms, and can also do cloud application and infrastructure monitoring, including resource utilization and hardware inventory on remote servers.

There are integrations for a large number of services, like Docker and Kubernetes, and parts of the Google Cloud Platform like Google Cloud Storage. Besides traditional monitoring, this tool can also do “Real User Monitoring”, allowing your team to “see website performance as users experience it” and synthetic monitoring to check the availability of websites and APIs.

Monitoring on Sematext is done via agents that collect and report information to the cloud-hosted platform. Those agents run on all the main Linux distributions and are lightweight, taking up as little as 40 MB of RAM and less than 2% of the processing power of a single CPU core. A 14-day free trial is available.

AppDynamics

Developed by Cisco, AppDynamics bills itself as “the world’s only business-first observability platform”, allowing you to “spot every application issue” and pinpoint root causes of application problems in real-time, from 3rd party APIs down to code-level issues.

It offers real-time monitoring “from code level to customer experience”, with application performance monitoring, end-user monitoring, and infrastructure visibility. This end-to-end transaction tracing can be done no matter if your resources are on-premises, in the cloud, or on a hybrid architecture.

The application performance baselining feature relies on agents that are monitoring business transactions sending performance and business data back to the controller, which uses AI to create a baseline of what is the “normal” performance of your applications. Health rules leverage those baselines to establish performance thresholds, with alerts being raised, and corrective action being undertaken, when those are exceeded.

Monitoring on AppDynamics is agent-based. The agents require a compatible Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and Java Runtime Environment (JRE). The Azul JRE version 1.8 is bundled on most of the supported platforms, which include AIX, Linux (CentOS, Debian, Fedora, open SuSE leap, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SuSE Linux Enterprise, and Ubuntu), Solaris, and Windows. There is a free 15-day trial available for GCP customers

Zenoss

Zenoss is a Google Cloud partner and offers a solution that can monitor all major public (including Azure, AWS, and the Google Cloud Platform) and private cloud platforms, as well as hybrid environments. The GCP integration includes resources in Google Compute Engine (GCE), Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Google Cloud Dataflow, and Google Cloud Functions.

Zenoss monitors the health, status, and performance of GCP’s compute instances and Kubernetes clusters, and the relationships between critical components of applications. This includes performance indicators such as CPU, disk, and memory usage for servers and containers, and network and firewall throughput and packet rate.

This tool can also help with cloud migrations, by identifying system interdependencies and redundant equipment to eliminate the cost of transitioning unnecessary systems, maintaining visibility, data collection, and dependency mapping as resources are migrated to the cloud.

To use Zenoss, you will need to install a Zenoss Cloud Collector virtual appliance to feed data into the platform. This can run as a Google Compute Engine instance in the Google Cloud Platform. Those interested in the platform can request a demo, but there is no free trial available.

Sumo Logic

Sumo Logic is a log analytics platform that offers deep integration with Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and the Google Cloud Platform, including GCP services like the Google App Engine, VPC, IAM, and Cloud Audit.

It has integration with the Anthos container management platform, to manage your Kubernetes clusters, and support for Google Apps, including monitoring and analysis of Google Apps audit logs. In total, there are 12 integrations specific to the GCP.

There is support for distributed transaction tracing for Kubernetes, allowing you to monitor execution and performance across an application, with full integration of logs, metrics, and metadata. According to Sumo Logic, the tracing feature “supports the OpenTelemetry standard and leverages open source components from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) to collect distributed tracing data.”

Sumo Logic is cloud-based but uses collectors to gather and feed data into the platform. These are Java-based, and support Windows Server (2012, 2016, 2019, and 2022), Windows 7, 8, 8.1, 20 or 11 (32 or 64-bit versions), macOS 10.10 (Yosemite) or later, and many Linux distributions, including RHEL and CentOS (6 or later), Ubuntu (14 or later), Debian (8 or later), SuSE (12 or later) and Amazon Linux AMI. There is a 30-day free trial of the platform available.

Dynatrace

Dynatrace has a Google Cloud Platform monitoring solution that offers “fully automated, AI-powered observability across Google Cloud hybrid-cloud environments”. Besides traditional performance metrics, it also collects “user experience data”, giving you better visibility on how your apps are being used and how users are experiencing their performance.

Using one automated agent, Dynatrace can discover, baseline, and monitor many components of the GCP, including the Google Compute Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, Anthos, and hybrid, multi-cloud environments.

It can also auto-discover microservices and containers in under 5 minutes, with no code or image changes, and monitor them in a transparent and automatic way, with zero manual instrumentation and automatic dependency mapping on the Google Kubernetes Engine environment.

An AI system nicknamed “Davis” uses “auto-adaptive baselining in response to the specific requirements of your environment” to reduce alert storms, only raising alerts for critical events, freeing your team from having to worry about false positives.

The Dynatrace monitoring agent (OneAgent) can run on Linux, Windows, Solaris, AIX, or IBM’s z/OS. There is a 15-day free trial available.

New Relic

New Relic is a monitoring solution that can be used for Application Performance Monitoring (APM), Infrastructure Monitoring, Network Monitoring, Log Management, and much more, boasting more than 500 integrations with popular tools and platforms, promising instant observability across all your stack.

The Infrastructure Monitoring aspect of the platform provides “dynamic observability of your entire infrastructure, from services running in the cloud or on dedicated hosts to containers running in orchestrated environments” like Amazon, Google Cloud, or Azure instances.

With integrated dashboards for infrastructure and application performance monitoring, New Relic can show system resources like CPU and memory usage for hosts, containers, and VMs within APM to easily detect under-provisioned resources, and quickly correlate drops in performance.

Monitoring on New Relic is done through “infrastructure agents” running on Windows Server (versions 2012, 2012 R2, 2016, 2019, and 2022), Windows 10 and their service packs, macOS (10.15 Catalina or higher, up to 13 Ventura), and Linux distributions such as CentOS, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), Oracle Linux, Debian, SuSE, and Ubuntu. Free trial accounts are available.

Conclusion

Among all these, our favorite Google Cloud monitoring tool is Paessler PRTG, as it “ticks all the boxes” in our list of desired characteristics, and streamlines your workflow by enabling you to monitor all of your infrastructure with a single tool.

The built-in sensors cover many of the main use cases, without the need to purchase extras, so it can monitor your infrastructure on the Google Cloud Platform, but also on Microsoft Azure or Amazon AWS, as well as your network, services, servers, IoT devices, databases, and much more. And it is extensible, which means you can deploy third-party sensors, or even develop your own, to cover specific needs.

That means you can do away with having to rely on a variety of individualized solutions, which can carry potential risks such as conflict with your current workflow and even network security issues. It really is a “Swiss army knife” of the monitoring tools.