This page describes how you can create PromQL-based alerting policies in Cloud Monitoring. You can use PromQL queries to create complex conditions with features such as ratios, dynamic thresholds, and combined metrics.
If you use Prometheus in environments outside Google Cloud, or if you use alerting in Managed Service for Prometheus, then you can migrate your Prometheus alerting rules to PromQL-based alerting policies. This way, you can manage all of your alerting policies in Cloud Monitoring.
You can also import Grafana dashboards into Cloud Monitoring.
- For general information about using PromQL in Monitoring, see PromQL in Cloud Monitoring.
- For general information about alerting policies, see Behavior of metric-based alerting policies.
Use PromQL in Cloud Monitoring alerting policies
You can create PromQL-based alerting policies in the following ways:
To create an alerting policy in the Google Cloud console and define a PromQL query in the code editor, see Create PromQL-based alerting policies (Console).
To create a PromQL-based alerting policy by using the gcloud CLI or the
AlertPolicyconstruct in the Monitoring API, see Create PromQL-based alerting policies (API).To migrate your Prometheus alerting rules and notification channels to Cloud Monitoring by using the Google Cloud CLI, see Migrate alerting rules and receivers from Prometheus.
Incidents created by a PromQL-based alerting policy appear in the Google Cloud console with your other incidents. You can interact with these incidents in the Google Cloud console.
The conditions of your PromQL-based alerting policy can reference any metric in Cloud Monitoring, including Google Cloud system metrics, custom and log-based metrics, and Prometheus metrics. You must translate the names of non-Prometheus metrics to PromQL metric syntax. For more information, see Mapping Monitoring metrics to PromQL.
Restrictions
A PromQL-based alerting policy can have a retest window of at most 24 hours and an alignment period of at most 24 hours. The sum of the retest window and alignment period must be at most 25 hours.
If your Prometheus alerting rule references a metric, then you must first have an equivalent metric descriptor in Cloud Monitoring before creating your PromQL-based alerting policy. However, you can override this validation by configuring your PromQL-based alerting policy with the Cloud Monitoring API. For more information, see Disable check for metric existence.
Pricing
In general, Cloud Monitoring system metrics are free, and metrics from external systems, agents, or applications are not. Billable metrics are billed by either the number of bytes or the number of samples ingested.
For more information about Cloud Monitoring pricing, see the following documents: