This page describes how you can optimize and monitor your Google Cloud Observability costs. For pricing information, see Google Cloud Observability pricing.
You might also be interested in the following documents:
- Estimate your bills.
- Pricing examples.
- Optimize costs with the Cost Explorer. The Cost Explorer provides current and historical visualizations of cost data and utilization metrics. As such, the data helps you identify optimization opportunities.
Optimize
This section provides guidance about how to reduce or optimize costs associated with Cloud Logging, Cloud Trace, and Google Cloud Managed Service for Prometheus.
Reduce your logs storage
To reduce your Cloud Logging storage costs, configure exclusion filters on your log sinks to exclude certain logs from being routed. Exclusion filters can remove all log entries that match the filter, or they can remove only a percentage of the logs. When a log entry matches an exclusion filter of a sink, the sink doesn't route the log entry to the destination. Excluded log entries don't count against your storage allotment. For instructions on setting exclusion filters, see Logs exclusions.
Another option to reducing your Cloud Logging storage costs is to route logs out of Cloud Logging to a supported destination. Cloud Logging doesn't charge to route logs to supported destinations. However, you might be charged when logs are received by a destination:
For information about routing logs out of Cloud Logging, see Route logs to supported destinations.
Optimize costs for Managed Service for Prometheus
Pricing for Managed Service for Prometheus is designed to be controllable. Because you are charged on a per-sample basis, you can use the following levers to control costs:
Sampling period: Changing the metric-scraping period from 15 seconds to 60 seconds can result in a 75% cost savings, without sacrificing cardinality. You can configure sampling periods on a per-job, per-target, or global basis.
Filtering: You can use filtering to reduce the number of samples sent to to the service's global datastore; for more information, see Filtering exported metrics. Use metric-relabeling configs in your Prometheus scrape configuration to drop metrics at ingestion time, based on label matchers.
Keep high-cardinality, low-value data local. You can run standard Prometheus alongside the managed service, using the same scape configs, and keep data locally that's not worth sending to the service's global datastore.
Pricing for Managed Service for Prometheus is designed to be predictable.
You are not penalized for having sparse histograms. Samples are counted only for the first non-zero value and then when the value for bucketn is greater than the value in bucketn-1. For example, a histogram with values
10 10 13 14 14 14counts as three samples, for the first, third and fourth buckets.Depending on how many histograms you use, and what you use them for, the exclusion of unchanged buckets from pricing might typically result in 20% to 40% fewer samples being counted for billing purposes than the absolute number of histogram buckets would indicate.
By charging on a per-sample basis, you are not penalized for rapidly scaled and unscaled, preemptible, or ephemeral containers, like those created by HPA or GKE Autopilot.
If Managed Service for Prometheus charged on a per-metric basis, then you would pay for a full month's cardinality, all at once, each time a new container was spun up. With per-sample pricing, you pay only while the container is running.
Queries, including alert queries
All queries issued by the user, including queries issued when Prometheus recording rules are run, are charged through Cloud Monitoring API calls. For the current rate, see the summary table for Managed Service for Prometheus pricing or Monitoring pricing.
Reduce your trace usage
To control Trace span ingestion volume, you can manage your trace sampling rate to balance how many traces you need for performance analysis with your cost tolerance.
For high-traffic systems, most customers can sample at 1 in 1,000 transactions, or even 1 in 10,000 transactions, and still have enough information for performance analysis.
Sampling rate is configured with the Cloud Trace client libraries.
Reduce your alerting bill
Starting no sooner than May 1, 2026, Cloud Monitoring will begin charging for the use of alerting policies. For information about the pricing model, see Pricing for alerting.This document describes strategies you can use to reduce costs for alerting.
Consolidate alerting policies to operate over more resources
Because of the $0.10-per-condition cost, it is more cost effective to use one alerting policy to monitor multiple resources than it is to use one alerting policy to monitor each resource. Consider the following examples:
Example 1
Data
- 100 VMs
- Each VM emits one metric,
metric_name metric_namehas one label, which has 10 values
- One alert condition
- Condition aggregates to the VM level
- 30-second execution period
- Condition cost: 1 condition * $0.10 per month = $0.10 per month
- Time series cost: 100 time series returned per period * 86,400 periods per month = 8.6 million time series returned per month * $0.35 per million time series = $3.02 per month
- Total cost: $3.12 per month
Example 2
Data
- 100 VMs
- Each VM emits one metric,
metric_name metric_namehas one label, which has 10 values
- 100 conditions
- Each condition is filtered and aggregated to one VM
- 30-second execution period
- Condition cost: 100 conditions * $0.10 per month = $10 per month
- Time series cost: 100 conditions * 1 time series returned per condition per period * 86,400 periods per month = 8.6 million time series returned per month * $0.35 per million time series = $3.02 per month
- Total cost: $13.02 per month
In both examples, you monitor the same number of resources. However, Example 2 uses 100 alerting policies, while Example 1 uses only one alerting policy. As a result, Example 1 is almost $10 cheaper per month.
Aggregate to only the level that you need to alert on
Aggregating to higher levels of granularity results in higher costs than aggregating to lower levels of granularity. For example, aggregating to the Google Cloud project level is cheaper than aggregating to the cluster level, and aggregating to the cluster level is cheaper than aggregating to the cluster and namespace level.
Consider the following examples:
Example 1
Data
- 100 VMs
- Each VM emits one metric,
metric_name metric_namehas one label, which has 10 values
- One alert condition
- Condition aggregates to the VM level
- 30-second execution period
- Condition cost: 1 condition * $0.10 per month = $0.10 per month
- Time series cost: 100 time series returned per period * 86,400 periods per month = 8.6 million time series returned per month * $0.35 per million time series = $3.02 per month
- Total cost: $3.12 per month
Example 4
Data
- 100 VMs, where each VM belongs to one service
- Five total services
- Each VM emits one metric,
metric_name metric_namehas one label, which has 10 values
- One condition
- Condition aggregates to the service level
- 30-second execution period
- Condition cost: 1 condition * $0.10 per month = $0.10 per month
- Time series cost: 5 time series returned per period * 86,400 periods per month = 432,000 time series returned per month * $0.35 per million time series = $0.14 per month
- Total cost: $0.24 per month
Example 5
Data
- 100 VMs
- Each VM emits one metric,
metric_name metric_namehas 100 labels with 1,000 values each
- One condition
- Condition aggregates to the VM level
- 30-second execution period
- Condition cost: 1 condition * $0.10 per month = $0.10 per month
- Time series cost: 100 time series returned per period * 86,400 periods per month = 8.5 million time series returned per month * $0.35 per million time series = $3.02 per month
- Total cost: $3.12 per month
Compare Example 1 to Example 4: Both examples operate over the same underlying data and have a single alerting policy. However, because the alerting policy in Example 4 aggregates to the service, it is less expensive than the alerting policy in Example 1, which aggregates more granularly to the VM.
In addition, compare Example 1 to Example 5: In this case, the metric cardinality in Example 5 is 10,000 times higher than the metric cardinality in Example 1. However, because the alerting policy in Example 1 and in Example 5 both aggregate to the VM, and because the number of VMs is the same in both examples, the examples are equivalent in price.
When you configure your alerting policies, choose aggregation levels that work best for your use case. For example, if you care about alerting on CPU utilization, then you might want to aggregate to the VM and CPU level. If you care about alerting on latency by endpoint, then you might want to aggregate to the endpoint level.
Don't alert on raw, unaggregated data
Monitoring uses a dimensional metrics system, where any metric has total cardinality equal to the number of resources monitored multiplied by the number of label combinations on that metric. For example, if you have 100 VMs emitting a metric, and that metric has 10 labels with 10 values each, then your total cardinality is 100 * 10 * 10 = 10,000.
As a result of how cardinality scales, alerting on raw data can be extremely expensive. In the previous example, you have 10,000 time series returned for each execution period. However, if you aggregate to the VM, then you have only 100 time series returned per execution period, regardless of the label cardinality of the underlying data.
Alerting on raw data also puts you at risk for increased time series when your metrics receive new labels. In the previous example, if a user adds a new label to your metric, then your total cardinality increases to 100 * 11 * 10 = 11,000 time series. In this case, your number of returned time series increases by 1,000 each execution period even though your alerting policy is unchanged. If you instead aggregate to the VM, then, despite the increased underlying cardinality, you still have only 100 time series returned.
Filter out unnecessary responses
Configure your conditions to evaluate only data that's necessary for your alerting needs. If you wouldn't take action to fix something, then exclude it from your alerting policies. For example, you probably don't need to alert on an intern's development VM.
To reduce unnecessary alerts and costs, you can filter out time series that aren't important. You can use Google Cloud metadata labels to tag assets with categories and then filter out the unneeded metadata categories.
Use top-stream operators to reduce the number of time series returned
If your condition uses a PromQL or an MQL query, then you can use a top-streams operator to select a number of the time series returned with the highest values:
For example, a topk(metric, 5) clause in a PromQL query limits
the number of time series returned to five in each execution period.
Limiting to a top number of time series might result in missing data and faulty alerts, such as:
- If more than N time series violate your threshold, then you will miss data outside the top N time series.
- If a violating time series occurs outside the top N time series, then your incidents might auto-close despite the excluded time series still violating the threshold.
- Your condition queries might not show you important context such as baseline time series that are functioning as intended.
To mitigate such risks, choose large values for N and use the top-streams operator only in alerting policies that evaluate many time series, such as alerts for individual Kubernetes containers.
Increase the length of the execution period (PromQL only)
If your condition uses a PromQL query, then you can modify the length
of your execution period by setting the
evaluationInterval field in the
condition.
Longer evaluation intervals result in fewer time series returned per month; for example, a condition query with a 15-second interval runs twice as often as a query with a 30-second interval, and a query with a 1-minute interval runs half as often as a query with a 30-second interval.
Monitor
This section describes how to monitor your costs by creating alerting policies. An alerting policy can monitor metric data and notify you when that data crosses a threshold.
Monitor monthly log bytes ingested
To create an alerting policy that triggers when the number of log bytes written to your log buckets exceeds your user-defined limit for Cloud Logging, use the following settings.
| New condition Field |
Value |
|---|---|
| Resource and Metric | In the Resources menu, select Global. In the Metric categories menu, select Logs-based metric. In the Metrics menu, select Monthly log bytes ingested. |
| Filter | None. |
| Across time series Time series aggregation |
sum |
| Rolling window | 60 m |
| Rolling window function | max |
| Configure alert trigger Field |
Value |
|---|---|
| Condition type | Threshold |
| Alert trigger | Any time series violates |
| Threshold position | Above threshold |
| Threshold value | You determine the acceptable value. |
| Retest window | Minimum acceptable value is 30 minutes. |
Monitor total metrics ingested
It can't create an alert based on the monthly metrics ingested. However, you can create an alert for your Cloud Monitoring costs. For information, see Configure a billing alert.
Monitor monthly trace spans ingested
To create an alerting policy that triggers when your monthly Cloud Trace spans ingested exceeds a user-defined limit, use the following settings.
| New condition Field |
Value |
|---|---|
| Resource and Metric | In the Resources menu, select Global. In the Metric categories menu, select Billing. In the Metrics menu, select Monthly trace spans ingested. |
| Filter | |
| Across time series Time series aggregation |
sum |
| Rolling window | 60 m |
| Rolling window function | max |
| Configure alert trigger Field |
Value |
|---|---|
| Condition type | Threshold |
| Alert trigger | Any time series violates |
| Threshold position | Above threshold |
Threshold value |
You determine the acceptable value. |
| Retest window | Minimum acceptable value is 30 minutes. |
Configure a billing alert
To be notified if your billable or forecasted charges exceed a budget, create an alert by using the Budgets and alerts page of the Google Cloud console:
-
In the Google Cloud console, go to the Billing page:
You can also find this page by using the search bar.
If you have more than one Cloud Billing account, then do one of the following:
- To manage Cloud Billing for the current project, select Go to linked billing account.
- To locate a different Cloud Billing account, select Manage billing accounts and choose the account for which you'd like to set a budget.
- In the Billing navigation menu, select Budgets & alerts.
- Click Create budget.
- Complete the budget dialog. In this dialog, you select Google Cloud projects and products, and then you create a budget for that combination. By default, you are notified when you reach 50%, 90%, and 100% of the budget. For complete documentation, see Set budgets and budget alerts.