Set up quota alerts and monitoring

You can set up quota usage alerts and monitoring by using Cloud Monitoring. This document describes how to set up alerts, create charts, and find more information about using Cloud Monitoring for Cloud Quotas.

Set up basic quota usage alerts

The Cloud Quotas dashboard is integrated with Cloud Monitoring. You can set up quota alerts from the IAM & Admin > Quotas & System Limits page to get notifications of quota events. For example, you can set up an alert to notify you when your quota usage reaches a percentage of the maximum value. This feature is only supported for project-level quotas.

To set up an alert for a specific quota or system limit, do the following:

  1. Make sure that you have permissions to create alerts

  2. In the Google Cloud console, go to the IAM & Admin > Quotas & System Limits page:

    Go to Quotas & System Limits

  3. In the right-most column of the table, click More actions, and then select Create usage alert. The Alert policy templates pane opens.

  4. Under Configure notifications, select your notification channel. The notification channel is how you receive the alert—for example email, SMS, or Pub/Sub.

  5. Click Create.

Create charts

The Cloud Monitoring metrics explorer lets you create charts to view metrics. You can use it to view metrics related to Cloud Quotas.

To view the metrics for a monitored resource by using the Metrics Explorer, do the following:

  1. In the Google Cloud console, go to the  Metrics explorer page:

    Go to Metrics explorer

    If you use the search bar to find this page, then select the result whose subheading is Monitoring.

  2. In the toolbar of the Google Cloud console, select your Google Cloud project. For App Hub configurations, select the App Hub host project or the app-enabled folder's management project.
  3. In the Metric element, expand the Select a metric menu, enter quota usage in the filter bar, and then use the submenus to select a specific resource type and metric:
    1. In the Active resources menu, select Consumer Quota.
    2. In the Active metric categories menu, select Quota.
    3. In the Active metrics menu, select a metric from the list. To display both active and inactive metrics, click Active to clear the filter in the Select a metric menu.
    4. Click Apply.

  4. To remove time series from the display, use the Filter element.

  5. To combine time series, use the menus on the Aggregation element. For example, to display the CPU utilization for your VMs, based on their zone, set the first menu to Mean and the second menu to zone.

    All time series are displayed when the first menu of the Aggregation element is set to Unaggregated. The default settings for the Aggregation element are determined by the metric type you selected.

  6. For quota and other metrics that report one sample per day, do the following:
    1. In the Display pane, set the Widget type to Stacked bar chart.
    2. Set the time period to at least one week.

After you've found the quota usage information you want, you can use Cloud Monitoring to create custom dashboards and alerts. For more information, see Do more with Cloud Monitoring.

Check quota metric support

Not all services support quota metrics in Cloud Monitoring. To see applicable quota metrics for supported services, select Consumer Quota as the resource type when building a chart or creating an alerting policy. Services that don't support quota metrics aren't displayed.

  • Common services that support quota metrics include Compute Engine, Dataflow, Spanner, Pub/Sub, Cloud Vision, Speech-to-Text, Cloud Monitoring, and Cloud Logging.

  • Common services that don't support quota metrics include App Engine and Cloud SQL.

Get metric names

Quotas and system limits have two types of names: display names and metric names. Display names have spaces and capitalization that make them easier for humans to read. Metric names are more likely to be lowercase and delimited by underscores instead of spaces (the exact format depends on the service).

The following instructions show how to get quota and system limit metric names using either the Google Cloud console or gcloud CLI.

Console

  1. In the Google Cloud console, go to the IAM & Admin > Quotas & System Limits page:

    Go to Quotas & System Limits

    The table on this page displays quotas and system limits that have usage or have adjusted values, and a reference entry for other quotas. The reference entry has the word "default" in parentheses at the end of the listing in the Name column. For example, SetIAMPolicy requests per minute per region (default) is the reference entry for the quota SetIamPolicyRequestsPerMinutePerProject.

  2. If you don't see the Metric column, take the following steps.

    1. Click Column display options.
    2. Select Metric.
    3. Click OK. The Metric column appears in the table.

The Metric column shows the metric names. To filter the results, enter a property name or value in the field next to Filter.

gcloud

To get the metric names for a Google Cloud service by using the gcloud CLI, run the quotas info list command. To skip lines that don't list metric names, pass the output to a command such as grep with metric: as the search term, or use the gcloud CLI --format flag:

gcloud beta quotas info list --project=PROJECT_ID_OR_NUMBER \
    --service=SERVICE_NAME --format="value(metric)"

Replace the following:

  • PROJECT_ID_OR_NUMBER: the project ID or project number.
  • SERVICE_NAME: the name of the service whose quota metrics you want to see—for example, the service name for Compute Engine is compute.googleapis.com. Include the googleapis.com portion of the service name.

Do more with Cloud Monitoring

The Cloud Monitoring tools let you monitor quota usage, values, and errors in depth. You can use these metrics to create custom dashboards and alerts. For example, you can view quota usage over time or receive an alert when you're approaching your quota value.

Cloud Monitoring supports a wide variety of metrics that you can combine with filters and aggregations for new and insightful views into your quota usage. For example, you can combine a metric for allocation quota usage with a quota_metric filter on Cloud TPU names.

Pricing for Cloud Monitoring is described in the Google Cloud Observability pricing document.

The Cloud Monitoring documentation is extensive, so here are a few documents to get you started:

  • Building charts: A comprehensive guide to creating charts and tables, and adding them to a custom dashboard.
  • Introduction to alerting: An overview covering how alerting works and what your options are for creating an alert policy.
  • Managing alerting policies: A guide to various management tasks for your existing alerting policies—for example, view a policy, edit a policy, delete a policy, or add a policy to a dashboard.
  • Using quota metrics: A detailed document dedicated to quotas use cases, with examples covering topics such as how to create alerts for quota/exceeded errors.
  • Google Cloud metrics guide: A metrics reference document. The serviceruntime section lists the quotas metrics used for monitoring.