Google Cloud Platform for Developers

Other types of metrics

The default Stackdriver metrics for managed resources are a great way to quickly configure alerts, but they often don't capture critical information about how your specific services are operating. For example, Stackdriver won't automatically monitor the frequency of todos being created that contain the word Google. In order to capture this application-specific information, we can use custom metrics and logs-based metrics.

Stackdriver provides APIs and client-libraries for defining any number of custom metrics, which are collected and submitted to Stackdriver. Once submitted, these metrics can be used to create dashboards and alerting policies just like any other Stackdriver metric. Custom metrics have the advantage ...