Cloud Monitoring provides integrations for monitoring third-party applications, but support for some of these integrations has been deprecated. For information about which integrations were deprecated, go to the deprecation guide for third-party integrations.
This guide provides the steps to transition these integrations to BindPlane, a solution provided by Monitoring partner, Blue Medora.
Cloud Monitoring offers BindPlane at no additional cost to Monitoring customers, but metrics collected through BindPlane are charged at standard custom metric rates. For information on the cost of this added consumption, refer to managing your costs.
Uninstalling the plugin for the third-party integration
Uninstall the plugin for the third-party integration by logging into each host and removing the configuration for each plugin instance.
Installing the BindPlane integration
The following sections provide details on installing and configuring BindPlane with Cloud Monitoring.
Creating a BindPlane account
To get started, create an account with BindPlane. After receiving an account-verification message, you can continue with the remainder of these procedures.
Connecting BindPlane to Cloud Monitoring
To connect to Monitoring, add a destination. In this case, your destination is Stackdriver. The most up-to-date information on linking your Monitoring account with BindPlane can be found at Blue Medora's guide for configuring a destination guide.
Installing the BindPlane collector
BindPlane collectors reside within your network and connect to any data source that you want to monitor. The collector requires a server with network access to the data sources you're planning to monitor.
To install the collector, complete the following steps:
In BindPlane, navigate to Collectors.
Click Add Collector.
Select your host system's operating system.
Click the Clipboard icon to copy the installation command.
Log into the host system you want to install the collector on and paste and run the command.
You can also install the collector through Google Deployment Manager. For instructions and security requirements on this deployment, refer to the GCP Collector Deployments guide.
Connecting to a data source
A source is any object you want to monitor. It could be a database, a web service, or even a hardware device in your data center. To add a source, complete the following steps:
In BindPlane, navigate to Sources.
Click Add Source.
Select which type of source you want to monitor.
Select the collector you installed on the host system.
Enter your credentials and click Test Connection to verify that your connection is working correctly.
Optionally, you can review the metrics that are configured to be sent to Monitoring and turn off any metrics that you don't need. Turning off these metrics can help you manage costs.
Click Add to begin monitoring. To see what credentials each source requires or for other information, refer to the source documentation.
Transferring existing dashboards and alerts
After installing the collector and connecting to a data source, your existing dashboards and alerts continue to work as they did previously.
If you have any issues, such as missing data, ensure the following conditions are met:
The collector is installed on the host system of the technology you're trying to monitor.
The data source is in a healthy state in BindPlane.
Managing your costs
Google has partnered with Blue Medora to bring BindPlane to Monitoring customers at no additional cost, licenses, or contracts. However, if you ingest more monitoring data and log data through Blue Medora than you did through the Monitoring agents, you might incur higher usage fees. For information on pricing, which applies to all custom metrics and logs over the free quota, see Pricing.
To help manage your costs, BindPlane allows you to control how much data is sent to Monitoring in two ways:
Tune your collection intervals: Collection intervals are set to 1 minute by default. Increasing the collection interval to 2 minutes would send half as much data to Monitoring for the given source. Increasing the interval to 10 minutes would send one-tenth as much data. Tuning the data collection interval allows you to find the balance between data resolution and cost that is right for your organization.
To tune this interval, on the Sources detail page, click Configure and then update the Collection interval field.
Disable the collection of unneeded metrics: When a source is configured, collection is enabled for all resource types and metrics. If you don't need a specific resource type or individual metric sent to Cloud Monitoring, then you can disable them to reduce the amount of data sent, reducing your costs.
To disable unneeded metrics, on the Sources detail page, click Metrics and disable metrics collection by clicking the Collect toggle.
Metrics guide
In addition to the metrics previously collected by the Monitoring
agent, the Bindplane integration collects additional metrics, expanding the
number of metrics collected for each technology. These additional metrics are
sent to the external.googleapis.com/bluemedora/generic_node/ namespace.
Deprecated Monitoring agent metrics that are now collected by the
equivalent BindPlane integrations are sent to the agent.googleapis.com
namespace.
The following table lists the number of metrics currently collected by the Cloud Monitoring agent and the number of additional metrics available from BindPlane.
| Integration name | Cloud Monitoring metrics | BindPlane metrics |
|---|---|---|
| Cassandra | 7 metrics | 257 metrics |
| Elasticsearch | 18 metrics | 160 metrics |
| HBase | 23 metrics | 200 metrics |
| Kafka | 18 metrics | 100 metrics |
| MongoDB | 12 metrics | 90 metrics |
| PostgreSQL | 7 metrics | 100 metrics |
| RabbitMQ | 4 metrics | 100 metrics |
| Tomcat | 7 metrics | 100 metrics |
| Varnish | 3 metrics | 170 metrics |
| ZooKeeper | 14 metrics | 30 metrics |