Starting today, Google Cloud Monitoring Read API is generally available, allowing you to programmatically access metric data from your running services, such as CPU usage or disk IO. For example, you can use Cloud Monitoring Read API with Nagios to plug in to your existing alerting/event framework, or use it with Graphite to combine the data with your existing graphs. Third party providers can also use the API to integrate Google Cloud Platform metrics into their own monitoring services.

Cloud Monitoring Read API allows you to query current and historical metric data for up to the past 30 days. Also, you can use labels to filter data to more specific metrics (e.g. zones). Currently Cloud Monitoring Read API supports reading metric time series data from the following Cloud Platform services:
  • Google Compute Engine - 13 metrics
  • Google Cloud SQL - 12 metrics
  • Google Cloud Pub/Sub - 14 metrics

Our documentation provides a full list of supported metrics. Over time we will be adding support for more Cloud Platform services metrics and enhancing the metrics for existing services. You can see an example of usage and try these metrics for yourself on our getting started page. For samples and libraries, click here.

Example: getting CPU usage time series data 
GET \
https://www.googleapis.com/cloudmonitoring/v2beta1/ \  # Access API
projects/YOUR_PROJECT_NAME/ \                          # For YOUR_PROJECT_NAME
timeseries/ \                                          # get time series of points
compute.googleapis.com%2Finstance%2Fcpu%2Fusage_time?\ # of CPU usage
youngest=2014-07-11T10%3A29%3A53.108Z& \           # with this latest timestamp
key={YOUR_API_KEY}                                     # using this API key
Your feedback is important!
We look forward to receiving feedback and suggestions at cloud-monitoring-feedback@googlegroups.com.

-Posted by Amir Hermelin, Product Manager