Explaining Monitoring Policies in GCP
The aim of this page📝 is to explain how to manage monitoring policies and notification channels in the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Console. I am learning this since the alerts we put into our applications are consumed also by the client in whose account the various Snowplow apps are running. Therefore if there are changes to alerting policies, sometimes we get follow-up questions that need to be answered even if we are managing the account autonomously via Terraform.
2 min readNov 21, 2023
- Monitoring policies and notification channels are part of GCP’s Cloud Monitoring service.
- Monitoring policies describe the conditions under which you want to be alerted and how you want to be notified.
- An alerting policy can monitor a) time-series data stored by Cloud Monitoring or b)logs stored by Cloud Logging.
- → Metric-based alerting policies monitor time-series data.
- → Log-based alerting policies monitor log data.
- When the data meets the alerting policy condition, Cloud Monitoring creates an incident and sends notifications.
- Each incident is a record of the type of data that was monitored and when the conditions were met.
- A notification channel defines how you receive notifications when Cloud Monitoring creates an incident.
- For example, you could create a metric-based alerting policy that monitors an application’s HTTP response latency metric.
- If the response latency is higher than a certain threshold for a certain period of time, then Monitoring creates an incident and sends notifications.
- To find monitoring policies in the GCP Console, go to Monitoring, and select Alerting, and Policies.
- You must have the Monitoring Editor role on your project to create and modify alerting policies.
- To find notification channels in the GCP Console, go to Monitoring, select Alerting, and click Edit notification channels or click on a selected policy.
