This document introducesApplication Monitoring, which is an application-centricapproach to monitoring your applications. Application Monitoring creates dashboards foryourApp Hub applications, services, andworkloads. It also displays a topology view of your application (preview). Tounderstand which resources your application uses and how those resourcesinteract, you use App Hub. To understand how your application'sresources are performing and to diagnose issues, you use Application Monitoring.

What is Application Monitoring?

Application Monitoring provides an application-centric approach to monitoring, letting youmonitor your resources and infrastructure from the perspective of anapplication. That is, you don't begin an investigation by searching yourresources and figuring out which resources your application uses. Instead, youbegin an investigation with your application, and then find information aboutthe resources and infrastructure that it uses. The dashboards and topology mapthat Application Monitoring generates for your application let you understand theoperational state of your application and its services and workloads.

Application Monitoring creates a dashboard for your application that showsmore detailed information, like golden signals, log data, and informationabout open incidents:

Application Monitoring also lets you view the topology of your application (preview). Thetopology map can help you visualize your workloads and services, and the trafficbetween them:

Why you should adopt Application Monitoring

Using Application Monitoring can save you time and effort. For example, suppose youuse theApplication Design Centerto help you design and deploy your application. Next, you useApp Hub to help you organize and manage that application. To understandthe performance of your application and to diagnose failures,you use Application Monitoring, which features the following:

• Dashboards that list your application, service, and workload data.

• A topological view of your application that visualizes traffic.

• The ability to filter your data telemetry by criticality and environment.

Once your application is deployed, the Application Monitoring servicediscovers your application and automatically builds dashboards tailoredto your environment. To support your investigation of incidents, thesedashboards support search and filtering.

The dashboards that Application Monitoring creates display the following:

• Information about the application, such as the location, criticality, andowners.

• Information about open incidents.

• Log and metric data generated bysupported infrastructure.The metric data includes golden signals, like error rates and traffic, andselect metrics.

• Trace data generated byinstrumented applications.This data includes span and service names, latency information, and errorrates.

When your application runs on supported infrastructure, Application Monitoringautomatically attaches application-specific labels to telemetry datathat your application generates. These labels identify yourApp Hub application. You can use these application-specificlabels when querying your telemetry data. TheLogs Explorer,Metrics Explorer, andTrace Explorer pages let you uselabels to filter and aggregate data.

Get started with Application Monitoring

To use Application Monitoring, do the following:

1. Create your application and register services and workloads to the application.Alternatively, you can deploy your application by using theApplication Design Center.

2. Configure the observability scope so that you can view the telemetry for yourapplication. For information about this step, seeSet up Application Monitoring.

3. If you want your application-generated metric and trace data to includeapplication labels, then instrument your application with OpenTelemetry or useGoogle Cloud Managed Service for Prometheus. For more information, seeInstrument app for Application Monitoring.

   Note: For workloads that run on Google Kubernetes Engine, the dashboards thatApplication Monitoring creates display OpenTelemetry-defined metrics for traffic, latency,and error rate golden signals.

4. Open and explore the Application Monitoring dashboards. For information about viewingthese dashboards, seeView application telemetry.

5. View a topological map of your application. For more information, seeView application topology.