Observability overview

Cloud Service Mesh providesobservability into the health and performanceof your services. To obtain telemetry data, Cloud Service Mesh relies onsidecar proxiesthat you inject as a separate container into the same Pods as your workloads.The proxies intercept all inbound and outbound HTTP traffic to the workloads andreport the data to Cloud Service Mesh. With this system, service developersdon't have to instrument their code to collect telemetry data.

Cloud Monitoring and Cloud Logging are enabled in yourGoogle Cloud project when you install Cloud Service Mesh. To reporttelemetry data, each sidecar proxy that is injected into your service Pods callsthe Cloud Monitoring API and the Cloud Logging API. The telemetry data isautomatically uploaded to the Cloud Service Mesh pages in theGoogle Cloud console. Note that metrics are displayed only for HTTP serviceson the Cloud Service Mesh pages in the Google Cloud console.

Cloud Service Mesh provides several preconfigured service dashboards in theGoogle Cloud console so you don't have to manually set up dashboards andcharts. This detailed telemetry enables operators to observe service behavior,and empowers them to troubleshoot, maintain, and optimize their applications.

On the Cloud Service Mesh pages in the Google Cloud console, you can:

  • Get an overview of all services in your mesh, providing you critical,service-level metrics on three of thefour golden signals of monitoring:latency, traffic, and errors.

  • Define, review, and set alerts against service level objectives (SLOs),which summarize your service's user-visible performance.

  • View metric charts for individual services and deeply analyze them withfiltering and breakdowns, including by response code, protocol, destinationpod, traffic source, and more.

  • Get detailed information about the endpoints for each service, and seehow traffic is flowing between services, and what performance looks likefor each communication edge.

  • Explore a service topology graph visualization that shows your mesh'sservices and their relationships.

What's next

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Last updated 2026-02-19 UTC.