Google Cloud Observability agents

Google Cloud Observability provides the following agents for collecting metrics on Linux and Windows VM instances.

Which agent should you choose?

  • Ops Agent: The primary agent and preferred agent for collecting telemetry from your Compute Engine instances. This agent combines logging and metrics into a single agent, providing YAML-based configurations for collecting your logs and metrics, and features high-throughput logging. You can configure the Ops Agent to collect metrics from supported third-party applications.
  • Legacy Monitoring agent: Gathers system and application metrics from virtual machine instances and sends them to Cloud Monitoring. By default, the Monitoring agent collects disk, CPU, network, and process metrics. You can configure the Monitoring agent to monitor third-party applications to get the full list of agent metrics.

Try it for yourself

If you're new to Google Cloud, create an account to evaluate how Google Cloud Observability performs in real-world scenarios. New customers also get $300 in free credits to run, test, and deploy workloads.

Try Google Cloud Observability free