If you’re interested in an even deeper analysis of your logs usage,
check out this post by one of Google’s Technical Solutions Consultants that will show you how to analyze your log volume using logs-based metrics in Datalab.
Controlling your monitoring and logging costs
Our new pricing model is designed to make the same powerful log and metric analysis we use within Google accessible to everyone who wants to run reliable systems. That means you can focus on building great software, not on building logging and monitoring systems. This new model brings you a few notable benefits:
- Generous allocations for monitoring, logging and trace, so many small or medium customers can use Stackdriver on their services at no cost.
- Monitoring: All Google Cloud Platform (GCP) metrics and the first 150 MB of non-GCP metrics per month are available at no cost.
- Logging: 50 GB free per month, plus all admin activity audit logs, are available at no cost.
- Pay only for the data you want. Our pricing model is designed to put you in control.
- Monitoring: When using Stackdriver, you pay for the volume of data you send, so a metric sent once an hour costs 1/60th as much as a metric sent once a minute. You’ll want to keep that in mind when setting up your monitoring schedules. We recommend collecting key logs and metrics via agents or custom metrics for everything in production; development environments may not need the same level of visibility. For custom metrics, you can write points at a smaller time granularity. Another way is to reduce the number of time series sent by avoiding unnecessary labels for custom and logs-based metrics that may have high cardinality.
- Logging: The exclusion filter in Logging is an incredible tool for managing your costs. The way we’ve designed our system to manage logs is truly unique. As the image below shows, you can choose to export your logs to BigQuery, Cloud Storage or Cloud Pub/Sub without needing to pay to ingest them into Stackdriver.
You can even use exclusion filters to collect a percentage of logs, such as 1% of successful HTTP responses. Plus, exclusion filters are easy to update, so if you’re troubleshooting your system, you can always temporarily increase the logs you’re ingesting.
Putting it all together: managing to your budget
Let’s look at how to combine the visibility from the new metrics with the other tools in Stackdriver to follow a specific monthly budget. Suppose we have $50 per month to spend on logs, and we’d like to make that go as far as possible. We can afford to ingest 150 GB of logs for the month. Looking at the Log Ingestion page, shown below, we can easily get an idea of our volume from last month—200 GB. We can also see that 75 GB came from our Cloud Load Balancer, so we’ll add an exclusion filter for 99% of 200 responses.
To help make sure we don’t go over our budget, we’ll also set a Stackdriver alert, shown below, for when we reach 145 GB on the monthly log bytes ingested. Based on the cost of ingesting log bytes, that’s just before we’ll reach the $50 monthly budget threshold.
Based on this alerting policy, suppose we get an email near the end of the month that our volume is at 145 GB for the month to date. We can turn off ingestion of all logs in the project with an exclusion filter like this:
logName:*
Now only admin activity audit logs will come through, since they don’t count toward any quota and can’t be excluded. Let’s suppose we also have a requirement to save all data access logs on our project. Our sinks to BigQuery for these logs will continue to work, even though we won’t see those logs in Stackdriver Logging until we disable the exclusion filter. So we won’t lose that data during that period of time.
Like managing your household budget, running out of funds at the end of the month isn’t a best practice. Turning off your logs should be considered a last option, similar to turning off your water in your house toward the end of the month. Both these scenarios run the risk of making it harder to put out fires or incidents that may come up. One such risk is that if you have an issue and need to contact GCP support, they won’t be able to see your logs and may not be able to help you.
With these tools, you’ll be able to plan ahead to help ensure you’re avoiding ingesting less useful logs throughout the month. You might turn off unnecessary logs based on use, rejigger production and development environment monitoring or logging, or decide to offload data to another service or database. Our new metrics, views and dashboards give you a lot more tools to see how much you’re spending in both resources and IT budget in Stackdriver. You’ll be able to bring flexibility and efficiency to logging and monitoring, and avoid unpleasant surprises.
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