Google Cloud Monitoring Offers Developers Metrics

Google (GOOG) has released to its customers a new API that provides metric data from cloud services currently running on the Google Cloud Platform. The new Google Cloud Monitoring Read API can be used to plug into existing alert/event frameworks built on Nagios, but it can also be used with Graphite to combine the data with existing graphics.

For Google's developer partners, the new API provides the ability to integrate Google Cloud Platform metrics into their own monitoring services. Using the API, developers and customers can query current and historical metric data up to 30 days prior. According to a blog post written by Amir Hermelin, a Google product manager, developers can also use labels to filter data to more specific metrics.

Currently, the new API supports reading metric time series data from Google Compute Engine (with 13 supported metrics), Google Cloud SQL (12 metrics supported) and Google Cloud Pub/Sub (14 metrics supported).

Using the API, developers and customers can gain access to a variety of metrics, including CPU usage and disk I/O.

The addition of such metrics could be a boon to developers building applications on the Google Cloud Platform. Even better, though, is the fact that the API enables metric data to be accessed almost immediately. Although it can stretch back 30 days in time, it can also provide developers with up-to-the-second metrics data.

Want to know what's going on in your cloud application right now? Not a problem, as long as the API works as Google stated it does. That's a potentially powerful tool not only for customers, but for developers looking to gain additional insights into how their apps are running on Google and what resources are being used at any given time or over a period of time.