This document introduces Application Monitoring, which is an application-centric approach to monitoring your applications. Application Monitoring provides out-of-the-box (OOTB) dashboards for your App Hub applications, services, and workloads. To understand which resources your application uses and how those resources interact, you use App Hub. To understand how your application's resources are performing and to diagnose issues, you use the telemetry data, which Application Monitoring displays on OOTB dashboards.
What is Application Monitoring?
Application Monitoring lets you monitor the resources and infrastructure from the perspective of an application. That is, you don't begin an investigation by searching your resources and figuring out which ones are used by your application. Instead, you begin an investigation with your application, and then find information about the resources and infrastructure that it uses. The OOTB dashboards generated for your application let you understand the operational state of your application and its services and workloads.
To use Application Monitoring, you must create your application and register services and workloads to the application and then configure the observability scope. To create an application and register services and workloads to it, you can use App Hub, or you can deploy your application by using the Application Design Center.
Why you should adopt Application Monitoring
Using Application Monitoring can save you time and effort. For example, suppose you use the Application Design Center to help you design and deploy your application. Next, you use App Hub to help you organize and manage that application, and you use Application Monitoring to understand the performance of your application and to diagnose failures:
- OOTB application, service, and workload dashboards
- Label propagation for the services and workloads of an App Hub applications.
- Filter telemetry by criticality and environment.
- Seamless integration with open-source
When your application is deployed, the Application Monitoring service discovers your application and automatically builds dashboards tailored to your environment. To support your investigation of incidents, these OOTB dashboards support search and filtering.
App Hub automatically attaches labels to your telemetry data. For example, there are application-specific labels attached to log and metric data. Some services, like Google Cloud Managed Service for Prometheus, also attach application-specific labels to telemetry data.
You can use these application-specific labels when querying your log or metric data. For example, on the explorer pages like the Logs Explorer and the Metrics Explorer, you can filter, or aggregate data, by label.
To help you manage your alerts, you can attach application-specific labels to your alerting policies. These labels, which are included in notifications and in incident dashboards, cause the alerting policies or their incidents to be shown on the OOTB dashboards.
For some configurations, Application Monitoring also supports OpenTelemetry, which is the most common open source standard for collecting telemetry from applications. For more information, see View application telemetry.