GCP Cloud Monitoring data source

For GCP, the Cloud Monitoring data source connects you to all those metrics Google collects. Authenticate with a service account JSON key, or if you’re running Grafana in GKE, use workload identity.

The plugin has a visual query builder that’s helpful if you’re not familiar with MQL, that’s Monitoring Query Language, Google’s syntax for metric queries. You can filter by resource type, select metrics, choose alignment and aggregation, all through dropdown menus.

For multi-project setups, grant your service account permissions across projects, and you can query them all from one Grafana instance.

Same story on trade-offs: API latency, native query language, alert evaluations calling the API.

But if GCP is your primary cloud and you want direct access to Cloud Monitoring data, this gives you exactly that.