Cloud Monitoring helps you keep a keen eye on all of your resources; from web sites to web servers, routers, load balancers, and more. Here is an overview of the Monitoring workflow:
You create an entity to represent the item you want to monitor. For example, the entity might represent a web site.
You attach a predefined check to the entity. For example, you could use the PING check to monitor your web site's public IP address.
You can run your checks from multiple monitoring zones to provide redundant monitoring as well as voting logic to avoid false alarms.
You create notifications and notification plans. A notification lets you define an action which Cloud Monitoring uses to communicate with you when a problem occurs. Notification plans allow you to organize a set of several notifications, or actions.
For example, you might define a notification that specifies an email that Cloud Monitoring will send when a condition is met.
You define one or more alarms for each check. An alarm lets you specify trigger conditions for the various metrics returned by the check. When a specific condition is met, the alarm is triggered and your notification plan is put into action.
For example, your alarm may indicate a PING response time. If this time elapses, the alarm could send you an email or a webhook to a URL.
