Estimate Cloud Monitoring cost from time series, sampling period and sample size across the tiered per-MiB rates.
Monitoring bills ingested sample volume, and volume is time series multiplied by samples per month, so cardinality and sampling period matter far more than how many metric names you define. Because the rate drops in tiers at 100,000 and 250,000 MiB, large estates pay a much lower blended price than the headline rate suggests. One badly chosen label — a user ID, a request path, a pod name — can multiply time series by thousands and turn observability into a top-five line on the invoice. Confirm the current per-MiB tiers in the Google Cloud pricing calculator, and compare the alternative sampling period here before adding cardinality.
Cloud Monitoring Cost
ingested MiB = time series × (seconds in the month ÷ sampling period) × bytes per sample ÷ 1 MiB; cost = MiB above the free allotment priced through the 100,000 and 250,000 MiB tiers.
ingested MiB = time series × (seconds in the month ÷ sampling period) × bytes per sample ÷ 1 MiB; cost = MiB above the free allotment priced through the 100,000 and 250,000 MiB tiers. Monitoring bills ingested sample volume, and volume is time series multiplied by samples per month, so cardinality and sampling period matter far more than how many metric names you define. Because the rate drops in tiers at 100,000 and 250,000 MiB, large estates pay a much lower blended price than the headline rate suggests.
One badly chosen label — a user ID, a request path, a pod name — can multiply time series by thousands and turn observability into a top-five line on the invoice. Confirm the current per-MiB tiers in the Google Cloud pricing calculator, and compare the alternative sampling period here before adding cardinality.
This calculator takes 11 inputs: Chargeable time series, Sampling period, Bytes per sample, Free ingestion allotment, Price per MiB up to 100,000 MiB, Price per MiB from 100,000 to 250,000 MiB, Price per MiB above 250,000 MiB, Monitoring API read calls, Free API read calls, Price per 1,000 API calls, Alternative sampling period to compare. The pre-filled defaults are a realistic starting point — replace them with figures from your own environment for a result you can act on.
Metrics written by Google Cloud services are free. You pay for custom metrics, Prometheus metrics collected by Managed Service for Prometheus, agent metrics and log-based metrics — which is exactly the set that grows when teams add instrumentation.