Buying snapshot
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| Decision point | What Google states |
|---|---|
Operating model | Fully managed services. Cloud Logging ingests application, platform and custom logs from GKE, VMs and other services inside and outside Google Cloud. |
Billing basis | Priced by data volume or usage, with free monthly allotments and no upfront fees or commitments. |
VM collection | Ops Agent for Linux and Windows sends Compute Engine logs and metrics to Cloud Logging and Cloud Monitoring; the agent repository is Apache-2.0 licensed. |
Custom telemetry | Custom metrics can come from the Cloud Monitoring API, client libraries, OpenCensus and OpenTelemetry. Most OTLP metrics bill by samples; OTLP metrics that the Ops Agent ingests as workload.googleapis.com metrics bill by bytes. |
Alert delivery | Alerting policies on metrics, health checks and uptime checks, with notification channels including Slack and PagerDuty. |
Billing units | All units are binary: MiB is 2^20 bytes and GiB is 2^30 bytes. |
Our take
If your workloads already run on Google Cloud, start here: your Google Cloud logs and metrics are already flowing in, and most charges start only after a free allotment. Some, such as vended network logs and Prometheus samples, bill from the first unit. If you need a fixed observability budget, measure your log, metric and span volume first, because every charge follows volume or usage.
Evaluate Google Cloud Operations
Comparisons
Where it stands out
Google Cloud data without setup. Cloud Logging automatically ingests Google Cloud audit and platform logs, and Cloud Monitoring gives a view of all Google Cloud metrics at zero cost.
Prometheus without running Prometheus. Managed Service for Prometheus stores data on the Cloud Monitoring data store. You can query it with PromQL or Cloud Monitoring and keep your open source dashboards and alerting tools.
Log queries are not metered. The storage charge covers querying and analysis. Upgrading a bucket to Log Analytics, which brings BigQuery into Cloud Logging, and running SQL queries from its page cost nothing. Log Router has no additional charge, but destination charges might apply to routed logs.
Profiler and Error Reporting are free. Google lists no cost for Cloud Profiler and no charge for Error Reporting. Error Reporting can still add Cloud Logging costs for the log entries it creates.
Serverless traces are free. Spans auto-generated by App Engine Standard, Cloud Run functions and Cloud Run are not charged.
Product screenshot
Trade-offs to weigh
No hard stop at the allotment. Usage over the free allotments is billed automatically, and no logs or metrics are dropped. To control cost, you exclude logs from ingestion. Take care with VPC flow logs: if you send them to Logging and then exclude them, flow-log generation charges apply again.
Alerting becomes a cost line. Charges start no sooner than September 1, 2027. PromQL and MQL policies count every metric they reference, and most conditions run every 30 seconds, so policy design drives the bill. Customers on an active discounted commit contract as of May 31, 2026 are not charged until that contract expires, renews, is extended or is replaced.
Custom metrics add up by data point. Each scalar point counts as 8 bytes and each distribution point as 80 bytes. This covers custom, external, Ops Agent third-party and user-defined logs-based metrics. Process metrics are charged at 5% of the volume rate.
Checks multiply. An uptime check that runs in three regions counts as three executions. Synthetic monitors can also add charges from Cloud Run functions, Cloud Storage and Cloud Logging.
Pricing and plan conditions
Logs, metrics and traces are charged to the project, billing account, folder or organization that receives the data. Metrics, log and trace scopes mostly do not change who pays. Uptime and synthetic executions are charged to the billing account in which they are defined. Beyond the data volume charges below, other product features are free. Google offers custom quotes through its sales team.
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| Usage | Published rate | Free allotment and conditions |
|---|---|---|
Logging storage | $0.50/GiB, one-time; includes up to 30 days of storage in log buckets | First 50 GiB/project/month. Volume counts log entry size before indexing. No storage charge for logs in the _Required bucket. |
Vended network logs storage | $0.25/GiB | Not applicable. Covers VPC Flow Logs, Firewall Rules Logging and Cloud NAT logs. |
Log retention | $0.01 per GiB per month for logs retained more than 30 days | No retention charge inside the default period or for the _Required bucket (fixed 400 days). |
Monitoring data charged by bytes | $0.2580/MiB: first 150–100,000 MiB; $0.1510/MiB: next 100,000–250,000 MiB; $0.0610/MiB: >250,000 MiB | First 150 MiB per billing account. Non-chargeable Google Cloud metrics are free. |
Prometheus-format samples, including most OTLP metrics | $0.06/million samples: first 0-50 billion; $0.048: next 50-250 billion; $0.036: next 250-500 billion; $0.024: >500 billion | Covers Managed Service for Prometheus, including GKE control plane metrics, and most OTLP metrics. Samples are counted per billing account. |
Monitoring read API calls | $0.50/million time series returned | First 1 million time series returned per billing account. Write calls and console reads (except Cloud Shell) are free. |
Uptime check executions | $0.30/1,000 executions | 1 million executions per Google Cloud project. |
Synthetic monitor executions | $1.20/1,000 executions | 100 executions per billing account. |
Alerting policies (from September 1, 2027) | $0.35 per month for each metric reference; $0.50 per 1,000,000 points returned by a metric alerting policy condition | Metric alerting policies on Billing, Quota or Uptime metrics are not charged. |
Trace ingestion | $0.20/million spans | First 2.5 million spans per billing account. |
Public signals
About these signals
Verified factual signals from public sources. They indicate observable activity or interest, not total adoption, product quality, or cost.
64 GitHub commits 90d203 GitHub stars0 vulnerabilities across 1 package
See all signals from 5 sources
npm · @google-cloud/monitoring@6.2.0
Alternatives to Google Cloud Operations
The reviewed substitutes for Google Cloud Operations among the cloud-native monitoring, and what would make each one the better answer.
Other approaches
A different approach to the same problem. Each substitutes only for the workload named beside it.
- Datadog
- Datadog and Google Cloud Operations both provide monitoring, logging and alerting for workloads on Google Cloud. Google Cloud Operations is Google's native suite and needs no separate setup for Google services; Datadog is an independent platform that brings the same view to every cloud a company uses.Applies to: Whether the cloud provider's own monitoring is enough, or a third-party platform is needed.
- Amazon CloudWatch
- Amazon CloudWatch is chosen instead of Google Cloud Operations for AWS-native application and infrastructure monitoring workloads. We recommend it over Google Cloud Operations for teams whose production systems and incident-response workflow are centered on AWS.
- Azure Monitor
- Google Cloud Operations is preferred over Azure Monitor for Google Cloud-centric application and infrastructure observability workloads. We recommend it over Azure Monitor for teams whose operational data, applications, and governance are centered on Google Cloud, while recognizing that Azure Monitor is purpose-built for Azure resources and hybrid coverage.