Running and troubleshooting production services requires deep visibility into your applications and infrastructure. While basic logs and metrics are available out of the box with Google Cloud Compute Engine (GCE), capturing advanced data used to require the installation of both a metrics agent and a logging agent.

Being alerted to an issue with your application before your customers experience undue interruption is a goal of every development and operations team. While methods for identifying problems exist in many forms, including uptime checks and application tracing, alerts on logs is a prominent method for issue detection. Previously, Cloud Logging only supported alerts on error logs and log-based metrics, but that was not robust enough for most application teams.

Setting up Cloud Monitoring dashboards for your team can be time consuming because every team's needs are different. Picking the right metrics, using the right visualizations to represent these metrics, deciding what metrics can go on the same chart, and determining the right pre-processing steps for metrics requires background and experience that may not yet exist among your development and operations teams.