Improved Logging Comes To Stackdriver Monitoring On AWS

Google recently updated its Stackdriver monitoring solution, which works on both AWS and its own cloud platform, with improved logging and diagnostics for applications that run in these clouds.

The service has also expanded free log limits.

Starting December 1, the logging feature in Stackdriver will offer developers 50GB of logs per project and month for free, and Google will only charge a flat rate of $0.5 per gigabyte per and month for anything above that.

And in terms of features, the company now allows developers to use any field in a log entry as a label and visualize data from their logs.

Equally interesting is the welcome ability to set up exclusion filters in the Logging API to get more control over which data gets ingested to begin with. As the company states:

“Exclusion filters allow you to reduce costs, improve the signal to noise ratio by reducing chatty logs, and manage compliance by blocking logs from a source or matching a pattern from being available in Stackdriver Logging.”

The idea behind these updates is clearly to make log analysis faster, more powerful, and easier to manage. To that end, Google has also worked to decorate the time between a log entry, and when it is reflected in the Stackdriver metrics.

It currently takes about five minutes for updates to become visible for Stackdriver users, but this new update will bring them down to under a minute.

And finally, users can also perform aggregated exports from multiple projects to GCS, PubSub or BigQuery. Previously, developers had to export data to these services for further analysis, one by one.