Observability
Ops Agent
The Ops Agent is the primary agent for collecting telemetry data from your Compute Engine instances. The Ops Agent collects metrics inside the VM, not at the hypervisor level. You can install Ops Agent by using three different methods:
- Use the Google Cloud CLI or the Google Cloud console to install the agent on individual VMs.
- Use an Agent Policy that installs and manages agents on your fleet of VMs.
- Use automation tools, like Ansible, Chef, Puppet, and Terraform, to install and manage agents on your fleet of VMs.
When monitoring any of the following non-virtual machine systems in Google Cloud, the Ops Agent is not required, and should not be installed: App Engine standard environment has monitoring built-in.
Data Collection Option
For collecting the data Prometheus will monitor, you can use the service in one of four ways:
- Managed data collection
- managed data collection in k8s environment
- recommended approach for all k8s environment
- Self-deployed collection
- prometheus installation managed by the user
- suitable for quick integrations into complex environment
- The Ops Agent
- Prometheus metrics scrapped and sent by the Ops Agent
- recommended for sending Prometheus metric data
- OpenTelemetry
- Deployed in any compute or k8s environment
- recommended for cross-signal workflows such as exemplars.