Monitoring third-party applications

This guide explains how to configure the legacy Cloud Monitoring agent to monitor supported third-party applications. Configuration is only possible when the legacy Monitoring agent is running on Linux. The agent on Windows monitors IIS and MS SQL applications; however, on these systems the agent cannot be configured to collect metrics from other third-party applications.

See Agent metrics for a list of the available metrics from the third-party applications. The configuration files are in the Monitoring agent's GitHub configuration repository.

After you have installed the legacy Monitoring agent, see the following configuration instructions for supported third-party applications:

The Cloud Monitoring Metrics Management page provides information that can help you control the amount you spend on billable metrics without affecting observability. The Metrics Management page reports the following information:

  • Ingestion volumes for both byte- and sample-based billing, across metric domains and for individual metrics.
  • Data about labels and cardinality of metrics.
  • Number of reads for each metric.
  • Use of metrics in alerting policies and custom dashboards.
  • Rate of metric-write errors.

You can also use the Metrics Management page to exclude unneeded metrics, eliminating the cost of ingesting them. For more information about the Metrics Management page, see View and manage metric usage.