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Observability overview
Cloud Service Mesh provides observability into the health and performance
of your services. To obtain telemetry data, Cloud Service Mesh relies on
sidecar proxies
that you inject as a separate container into the same Pods as your workloads.
The proxies intercept all inbound and outbound HTTP traffic to the workloads and
report the data to Cloud Service Mesh. With this system, service developers
don't have to instrument their code to collect telemetry data.
Cloud Monitoring and Cloud Logging are enabled in your
Google Cloud project when you install Cloud Service Mesh. To report
telemetry data, each sidecar proxy that is injected into your service Pods calls
the Cloud Monitoring API and the Cloud Logging API. The telemetry data is
automatically uploaded to the Cloud Service Mesh pages in the
Google Cloud console. Note that metrics are displayed only for HTTP services
on the Cloud Service Mesh pages in the Google Cloud console.
Cloud Service Mesh provides several preconfigured service dashboards in the
Google Cloud console so you don't have to manually set up dashboards and
charts. This detailed telemetry enables operators to observe service behavior,
and empowers them to troubleshoot, maintain, and optimize their applications.
On the Cloud Service Mesh pages in the Google Cloud console, you can:
Get an overview of all services in your mesh, providing you critical,
service-level metrics on three of the
four golden signals of monitoring:
latency, traffic, and errors.
Define, review, and set alerts against service level objectives (SLOs),
which summarize your service's user-visible performance.
View metric charts for individual services and deeply analyze them with
filtering and breakdowns, including by response code, protocol, destination
pod, traffic source, and more.
Get detailed information about the endpoints for each service, and see
how traffic is flowing between services, and what performance looks like
for each communication edge.
Explore a service topology graph visualization that shows your mesh's
services and their relationships.
[[["Easy to understand","easyToUnderstand","thumb-up"],["Solved my problem","solvedMyProblem","thumb-up"],["Other","otherUp","thumb-up"]],[["Hard to understand","hardToUnderstand","thumb-down"],["Incorrect information or sample code","incorrectInformationOrSampleCode","thumb-down"],["Missing the information/samples I need","missingTheInformationSamplesINeed","thumb-down"],["Other","otherDown","thumb-down"]],["Last updated 2025-08-25 UTC."],[],[],null,["# Observability overview\n======================\n\nCloud Service Mesh provides *observability* into the health and performance\nof your services. To obtain telemetry data, Cloud Service Mesh relies on\n[sidecar proxies](/service-mesh/docs/onboarding/kubernetes-workloads#inject_sidecar_proxies)\nthat you inject as a separate container into the same Pods as your workloads.\nThe proxies intercept all inbound and outbound HTTP traffic to the workloads and\nreport the data to Cloud Service Mesh. With this system, service developers\ndon't have to instrument their code to collect telemetry data.\n\nCloud Monitoring and Cloud Logging are enabled in your\nGoogle Cloud project when you install Cloud Service Mesh. To report\ntelemetry data, each sidecar proxy that is injected into your service Pods calls\nthe Cloud Monitoring API and the Cloud Logging API. The telemetry data is\nautomatically uploaded to the Cloud Service Mesh pages in the\nGoogle Cloud console. Note that metrics are displayed only for HTTP services\non the Cloud Service Mesh pages in the Google Cloud console.\n\nCloud Service Mesh provides several preconfigured service dashboards in the\nGoogle Cloud console so you don't have to manually set up dashboards and\ncharts. This detailed telemetry enables operators to observe service behavior,\nand empowers them to troubleshoot, maintain, and optimize their applications.\n\nOn the Cloud Service Mesh pages in the Google Cloud console, you can:\n\n- Get an overview of all services in your mesh, providing you critical,\n service-level metrics on three of the\n [four golden signals of monitoring](https://sre.google/sre-book/monitoring-distributed-systems/#xref_monitoring_golden-signals):\n latency, traffic, and errors.\n\n- Define, review, and set alerts against service level objectives (SLOs),\n which summarize your service's user-visible performance.\n\n- View metric charts for individual services and deeply analyze them with\n filtering and breakdowns, including by response code, protocol, destination\n pod, traffic source, and more.\n\n- Get detailed information about the endpoints for each service, and see\n how traffic is flowing between services, and what performance looks like\n for each communication edge.\n\n- Explore a service topology graph visualization that shows your mesh's\n services and their relationships.\n\nWhat's next\n-----------\n\n- [Control access to Cloud Service Mesh in the Google Cloud console](/service-mesh/docs/access-dashboard)\n- [Learn about SLOs](/service-mesh/docs/observability/slo-overview)\n- [Create an alerting policy on an SLO](/service-mesh/docs/observability/alert-policy-slo)"]]
