In previous chapters, we have worked with many provisions and services of GCP, ranging from Compute Engine-hosted VMs to serverless, fully managed databases. When we are dealing with so many different components, keeping track of usage, errors, and activities becomes essential. This is where GCP's Stackdriver services are useful. Stackdriver is a cloud monitoring, metrics and analysis service by Google. Its main task is to provide performance and diagnostic data to GCP users. Stackdriver offers logging and monitoring services for GCP resources for free, up to a certain quota, and can monitor both GCP and AWS resources for premium account holders.

In this chapter, you will learn about the following:

• Logging in GCP
• Filtering in logs
• Exporting logs
• Stackdriver monitoring