Monitoring GCP VM Performance and Logs: Tools, Metrics, and Best Practices

1. Introduction

Monitoring is essential for ensuring your VM instances run smoothly and securely. Google Cloud Platform (GCP) provides Cloud Monitoring and Cloud Logging to help you track performance metrics, detect operational issues, and analyze system and application logs in real time.

2. Cloud Monitoring Overview

Cloud Monitoring gives deep visibility into VM performance and infrastructure health.

Key capabilities include:

• Collects metrics such as CPU, memory, disk, and network usage

• Provides dashboards, alerts, and visual charts

• Integrates with other GCP services for end-to-end observability

3. Setting Up Monitoring

Follow these steps to configure monitoring for your VM instances:

1. Navigate to Monitoring → Dashboards in the GCP Console

2. Create a new dashboard

3. Add charts for:

   • CPU utilization

   • Memory usage

   • Network traffic

4. Configure alerting policies, for example:

   • CPU usage > 80% for 5 minutes

This ensures you’re notified before performance issues impact users.

4. Cloud Logging Overview

Cloud Logging captures logs from multiple sources, including:

• VM instances

• Applications

• System and OS processes

Key features:

• Filter, search, and analyze logs efficiently

• Export logs for long-term storage

• Integrate with BigQuery for advanced analytics

5. Viewing Logs

To inspect logs for your VM instances:

1. Go to Logging → Logs Explorer

2. Select the relevant VM instance

3. Filter logs by severity:

   • INFO

   • WARNING

   • ERROR

4. Export logs to:

   • Cloud Storage

   • BigQuery (for compliance and analytics)

6. CLI Commands for Monitoring & Logging

You can also monitor and analyze logs using the GCP CLI.

View VM CPU Usage

Stream VM Logs

7. Best Practices

To get the most out of GCP monitoring and logging:

• Set up alerts for critical metrics

• Use dashboards for real-time visibility

• Export logs for compliance and auditing

• Regularly review logs to detect anomalies

• Automate monitoring using scripts or APIs

8. Visual Guide (Image Suggestions)

Recommended visuals for this post:

• Screenshot of a Cloud Monitoring dashboard

• Logs Explorer view with filters applied

• Infographic showing the flow:
  Monitor → Alert → Analyze → Improve

9. Conclusion

Monitoring VM performance and logs in GCP ensures reliability, security, and operational efficiency. With Cloud Monitoring and Cloud Logging, teams gain real-time insights and proactive alerting.

👉 In the next post, we’ll explore GCP networking basics, including VPCs, subnets, and routes.