Google has introduced what it claims is a simplified pricing model for organizations using its Stackdriver Monitoring and Logging service to manage cloud workloads.
Highlights of the new model include a pay-as-you-go pricing option, volume-based pricing discounts and no-cost availability of Google Cloud Platform performance metrics.
The new pricing structure also brings some services that were previously available only to organizations at the premium pricing tier to all Stackdriver users.
Starting June 30 for instance, all organizations using Stackdriver to monitor their cloud-hosted applications will have access to advanced alerting and notification options. They will also be able to set their own alerting policies and create monitoring dashboards without having to sign up for the premium-pricing plan.
“We hope that this new pricing model will enable you to use the Stackdriver family of tools widely and freely,” said Google product managers Mary Koes, JD Velasquez and Jay Judkowitz in a blog March 12.
Google’s Stackdriver is designed to help organizations monitor, log and manage application performance on Google’s cloud platform, Amazon Web Services or a hybrid of the two environments. Organizations can use it to collect what Google describes as metrics, metadata and events from Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services and several common cloud application components such as Cassandra, Apache Web Server, Elasticsearch and Nginx.
Organizations can use Stackdriver to ingest data from these sources and analyze it using dashboards and visualization tools so they can quickly identify and address potential performance-impacting issues. The data that Stackdriver collects can also be used to enable insights into long-term trends that might require attention.
With the new pay-as-you-go option, Stackdriver customers will only need to pay for the monitoring data that is actually sent for analysis. Pricing will not be based on the number of cloud computing resources used for a particular project, or the overall quantity of data that is collected, the three Google product managers said.
The pricing for monitoring non-Google cloud metrics, including AWS metrics and logs based metrics have been reduced 80 percent from $0.258 per MB ingested to $0.061 per MB ingest under the new automatic volume discounts for Stackdriver application monitoring.
With the new pricing model, Google will also retain Stackdriver logging data for a period of 30 days rather than the 7 days that was the standard practice up to this week. Organizations will get a free monthly log allocation of 50 GB. Logs over that free limit will be billed at $0.50 per GB that is ingested.
Stackdriver customers will get so-called exclusion filters they can use to automatically discard logs they are not interested in so they don’t end up paying retention charges for those logs. They can also turn off log ingestion in Stackdriver completely while ensuring the log data is still available to other applications including Google’s BigQuery big data analytics service and PubSub for stream analytics.
“Here at Google Cloud, we believe that monitoring, logging and performance management are the foundation of any well-managed application—in our cloud, on another cloud, or on-premises,” Koes, Velasquez and Judkowitz said.