Google updates Stackdriver, its suite of cloud application monitoring tools
Google on Thursday announced a series of updates to Stackdriver, its integrated monitoring, logging and diagnostics suite for cloud-based applications on Google Cloud Platform and AWS.
Stackdriver now offers easier analysis with logs-based metrics, the ability to aggregate exports of logs and the ability to fine-tune the logging pipeline with exclusion filters.
Additionally, Google's announcing that, starting Dec. 1, Stackdriver Logging will offer 50GB of logs per project per month for free. After Dec. 1, any additional logs will be charged at a flat rate of $0.50 per gigabyte. Customers can also sign up for the Stackdriver Premium Tier to keep logs beyond the free 50GB per month allocation. Google is exempting admin activity audit logs from the limits and overage, and customers can now keep them for 13 months instead of 30 days.
Google introduced Stackdriver in beta in March 2016, calling it a single pane of glass for monitoring hybrid cloud infrastructure -- giving customers insight into their cloud usage, which would theoretically compel them to migrate more workloads to Google. Stackdriver was made generally available in October of last year.
Here's more on the latest updates:
- Improved log-based metrics: It now takes under a minute, rather than five minutes, for a log entry to be reflected in a logs based metric. Additionally, users can extract user-defined labels from text in the logs. You can also extract values from logs and turn them into distribution metrics, allowing you to efficiently represent many data points at each point in time. Stackdriver Monitoring can then visualize these metrics as a heat map or by percentile.
- Aggregated exports: Customers can export logs to GCS, PubSub or BigQuery using log sinks, but managing exports across projects has been tedious for some customers.Now, admins can set up sinks once to be inherited by all the child projects and subfolders. This can, for instance, enable a security administrator to export all audit logs in her organization to BigQuery with a single command:
- Exclusion filters: Now in beta, exclusion filters should help customers reduce costs, improve the signal to noise ratio by reducing chatty logs, and manage compliance by blocking logs from a source or matching a pattern from being available in Stackdriver Logging.