Google is simplifying pricing for Stackdriver Monitoring, a tool that allows customers to monitor the performance, uptime and overall health of applications running on Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and third-party services.
The new Stackdriver Monitoring pricing model starts June 30, according to a Google Cloud Platform blog, and involves:
- Flexible pay-as-you-go pricing model that optimizes your spend—pay only for the monitoring data you send, not by the number of resources you have in your projects.
- Permanent free allocation replaces free trials — all GCP metrics and the first 150 MB of non-GCP metrics per month are available at no cost.
- Automatic volume-based discounts — for non-GCP metrics including agent metrics, AWS metrics, logs based metrics, and custom metrics, this volume-based pricing of $.258 down to $.061 per MB ingested represents an up to 80% discount over previously announced prices.
On a related note, a new pricing model for Stackdriver Logging will kick off June 30. The company originally targeted March 31 for the log pricing change, but apparently pushed back the effort to ensure alignment with Stackdriver Monitoring.
Google Cloud Platform: Partner Momentum
Although Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure are widely considered the public cloud market leaders, Google is making considerable, sustained progress. Numerous MSPs now support Google Cloud Platform, and a growing number of MSP-friendly platforms now run in the search giant's cloud. True believers include Acronis Backup, Scale Computing, and Rackspace, among others.
Still, Google realizes it needs to support third-party clouds (at least in some ways) in order to win more converts. Hence, Stackdriver Monitoring's support of AWS, among other third-party services.
