Google Cloud just got better with Cloud Monitoring, Cloud Trace services

Last year, Google acquired Stackdriver, and announced that it would integrate Stackdriver’s cloud application monitoring functionality into the Google Cloud Platform. Since then, the search engine giant has been integrating and testing the service with limited set of alpha users. Now, eight months later, Google is launching the beta availability of Google Cloud Monitoring service. All Google Cloud Platform customers can now use Cloud Monitoring to gain insight into the performance, capacity and uptime of Google App Engine, Google Compute Engine, Cloud Pub/Sub, and Cloud SQL. [caption id=“attachment_695717” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Google logo is seen in this file photo. AP[/caption] “The Cloud Monitoring streamlines operations by unifying infrastructure monitoring, system/OS monitoring, service/uptime monitoring, charting and alerting into a powerful hosted service,” Dan Belcher, product manager at Google, said in a blogpost. “The Cloud Monitoring Console provides a high-level overview of the health and key metrics for your environment.” Cloud Monitoring features native integration with common open source services, such as MySQL, Nginx, Apache, MongoDB, RabbitMQ and many more. For example, you can use our Cassandra plugin to gain deep visibility into the performance of your distributed key value store. “Also, you can configure alerts to notify your team when specified conditions are met, such as when the request latency for your App Engine module exceeds a certain threshold. These alerts can be configured to notify you via email, SMS, PagerDuty, Campfire, Slack, HipChat and webhook.” Developers can also tailor Cloud Monitoring to suit their needs. They can publish their own custom metrics to Google’s API and bring them together with system and infrastructure metrics on custom dashboards. Google said it is working to integrate the rest of the Stackdriver technology into Cloud Monitoring with the goal of providing a unified monitoring solution for Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services and hybrid customers. It is also working to integrate Cloud Monitoring and Cloud Logging more deeply to simplify root cause analysis for issues. The beta availability of Cloud Monitoring is one of two Cloud Platform-related announcements that Google has made this year. Last week, Google announced its beta of Cloud Trace, a tool designed to help developers diagnose service performance bottlenecks in production applications running on Google App Engine. “With Google Cloud Trace, you can diagnose performance issues in your production application by quickly finding the traces for slow requests and viewing a detailed report of where time is spent in your application while processing these requests,” said Pratul Dublish, product manager at Google, in a blogpost. “The trace analysis feature allows you to see the latency distribution for your application, and find the painfully slow requests that may be affecting only a small number of your users. You can also use the trace analysis feature to check if the performance of a new release is better than the previous release.”