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Metrics are the heartbeat of your monitoring strategy. They are numerical measurements collected at regular intervals that describe the behaviour of your systems over time. Google Cloud Monitoring provides a powerful metrics infrastructure with automatic collection, flexible querying, and rich visualisation through dashboards.
Every metric in Cloud Monitoring has a kind that describes how values relate over time:
| Kind | Description | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Gauge | A value at a specific point in time | CPU utilisation (45%), memory usage (2.3 GiB) |
| Delta | The change in value over a time interval | Request count in the last minute, bytes sent in the last 5 minutes |
| Cumulative | A running total since a fixed start time | Total requests since process start, total bytes transferred |
Understanding metric kinds is critical when choosing aggregation functions. You cannot meaningfully sum gauge metrics across time — you would use mean or max instead.
Metrics also have a value type that determines the data format:
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