Published Dec. 15, 2023
If you're running workloads on Compute Engine, chances are your GCP server monitoring setup grew the same way most do: a few alerts configured when the project launched, maybe a dashboard someone built once, and not much revisited since. That's fine until a VM runs out of disk at 2 a.m. or a certificate expires on a Friday.
This list isn't about switching tools. It's a practical check of the things that actually get missed in a typical GCP monitoring setup — the gaps that don't show up until they cause an incident, a surprise bill, or a support ticket that shouldn't have reached a customer in the first place. Run through it against your current setup and you'll likely find at least one item nobody's checked in a while.
The basics that most outages trace back to
A surprising number of production incidents come down to a disk that quietly filled up or a memory leak nobody caught early. Check that every Compute Engine instance — not just the obvious production ones — has CPU, memory, and disk usage tracked continuously, with history you can look back on, not just a live snapshot.
What your VM reports isn't what your customer experiences
A server can look perfectly healthy from the inside — normal CPU, normal memory — while the actual endpoint is unreachable from the outside due to a firewall rule, a load balancer misconfiguration, or a crashed process. Uptime checks that hit your service the way a real user would catch this gap.
The outage that announces itself weeks in advance, if anyone's watching
Certificate expiry is one of the few outages that's entirely predictable, yet it still catches teams off guard because nothing else about the server changes until the moment it expires. Any HTTPS endpoint on GCP should be checked regularly for days remaining, not just at renewal time.
"We have backups" is not the same as verified backups
It's common to assume a snapshot policy is running because it was set up once, without confirming it's still attached to every instance that matters. Checking actual snapshot history per instance — not just the policy configuration — is the only way to know backups exist when you need one.
Cost spikes are easy to miss until the invoice arrives
GCP spend can climb gradually as projects add instances, or jump suddenly from a misconfigured resource. Reviewing month-over-month cost by service, rather than only the total bill, makes it possible to catch a spike while it's still small.
Default thresholds are guesses, not facts about your workload
A threshold copied from a tutorial or left at a vendor default either fires too often to be useful or stays quiet until it's too late. Thresholds set against how your specific application actually behaves — different for a database than for a web server — are what make alerts worth acting on.
A real outage and a five-second blip shouldn't trigger the same alert
Without a short delay before an alert fires, a momentary network hiccup gets treated the same as a genuine outage, and teams learn to ignore alerts as a result. Just as important is where the alert goes — a notification sitting in an inbox nobody checks is functionally the same as no alert at all.
Not every team needs the same depth here. A small side project might only need uptime and SSL checks. A production environment handling customer traffic needs all seven, plus a clear owner for each one. The honest way to choose is to look at your last two incidents: what would have caught them earlier? That answer usually tells you which of these seven items actually needs attention first, rather than trying to set up everything at once.
BigBell's GCP monitoring covers this list directly rather than requiring a separate tool for each piece. It tracks CPU, memory, and disk on your Compute Engine instances, and checks uptime, response time, and SSL certificate expiry for any public endpoint. It connects to your GCP project to list VM instances and machine types by zone, and checks actual snapshot history per instance so you know whether a backup genuinely exists rather than assuming one does. Billing is pulled directly from your GCP billing export, giving you service-level cost and month-over-month change without a separate login. Alert thresholds are set per project or application rather than globally, and a configurable delay means a brief blip doesn't get treated as an outage — while alerts themselves can reach your team over email, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Google Chat, WhatsApp, SMS, or a phone call.
Try BigBell free and see which of these seven your current setup is actually missing.
Not necessarily. Uptime, SSL expiry, and basic resource monitoring cover most small projects. The remaining items — backup verification, cost tracking, and tuned alert thresholds — matter more as the environment grows or starts handling real customer traffic.
Google Cloud has its own monitoring tools, and they work well for GCP-specific metrics. The gap most teams run into is a single view across everything on this list — resource health, external uptime, certificate expiry, backups, and cost — without switching between the GCP console and separate tools for the rest.
Rather than relying on a backup policy being configured, BigBell checks the actual snapshot history for each instance, so you can see whether a recent, usable snapshot exists rather than assuming one does.
No. Thresholds are set per project or application rather than using one generic default, and a configurable delay means a short-lived spike doesn't trigger an alert the way a sustained problem does.
Yes. Alerts can be routed to Slack, Microsoft Teams, Google Chat, WhatsApp, SMS, or a phone call, in addition to email, so they reach whichever channel your team actually watches.
BigBell connects to your GCP project directly, so you can list VM instances and available machine types by zone rather than checking the console zone by zone. That makes it easier to notice, for example, an instance running in a zone nobody actively works in anymore.
It connects using a GCP service account you provide, scoped to your project. VM inventory and snapshot checks use your Compute Engine credentials, and billing uses read access to your GCP billing export — both set up once when you connect the project.
