Stackdriver, Google’s monitoring, logging and diagnostics solution for applications that run on Google Cloud Platform and AWS, is getting a number of new logging features and expanded free log limits today. Starting December 1, Stackdriver’s logging feature will offer developers 50GB of logs per project and month for free. Above that, Google will charge a flat rate of $0.50 per gigabyte and month.
The general theme of this update is that Google wants to make log analysis faster, easier to manage and more powerful. To do this, the team worked to decrease the time between a log entry and when it’s reflected in the Stackdriver metrics. Currently, it takes about five minutes for updates to become visible for Stackdriver users. The team brought this lag down to under a minute now.
For most use cases, even a five-minute lag wasn’t much of an issue, but nobody is going to complain about faster updates.
Google also now allows developers to use any field in a log entry as a label and visualize data from their logs. What’s maybe even more interesting, though, is that developers can now set up exclusion filters in the Logging API that gives them more control over which data gets ingested to begin with. “Exclusion filters allow you to reduce costs, improve the signal to noise ratio by reducing chatty logs, and manage compliance by blocking logs from a source or matching a pattern from being available in Stackdriver Logging,” Google product managers Mary Koes and Deepak Tiwari write in today’s announcement.
Another new feature is the ability to perform aggregated exports from multiple projects to GCS, PubSub or BigQuery. Until now, exporting data to these services for further analysis meant developers had to export them all one-by-one.
