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Instrumentation refers to the specific code that generates or collects data about your application's runtime behavior. Inside of your application, instrumentation, such as that provided by OpenTelemetry, can collect domain specific information about the language runtime, framework, or application logic, and then send that data to a Google Cloud project or to some other destination. This data, which is also known as telemetry, includes metrics, logs, and traces.
System-level metrics such as CPU usage, memory usage, and disk usage are valuable for detecting problems with your application, but they don't provide much insight into application-level concerns. Instrumentation can help your application generate the data that you need to diagnose the root cause of a problem, because the resulting telemetry shows you what is happening inside of your application. For example, logs often include context about your program like a specific error message or stacktrace, and the location in your source code. Similarly, distributed traces help you understand how multiple services interact when processing requests. Metrics let you get notified when your application isn't behaving correctly.
Instrumenting your application involves generating telemetry and sending it to where the data can be stored and queried. For example, your instrumentation might send telemetry to a Google Cloud project. Services in Google Cloud Observability help you to collect, analyze, and correlate telemetry data. They also provide built-in defaults to help you get started faster such as default dashboards and alert policies. For more information about Google Cloud Observability, see Observability in Google Cloud.
The following figure illustrates how an application uses instrumentation to generate and send telemetry to a storage system:
As illustrated in previous figure, the instrumentation code exists within your application's process and interacts with the application to generate telemetry data. The instrumentation framework then exports your telemetry to a configured storage system. In the figure, the storage system is your Google Cloud project.
About vendor-neutral instrumentation frameworksEven if you plan to send telemetry only to Google Cloud, we recommend that you use a vendor-neutral open source instrumentation framework to instrument your applications. These types of frameworks have some key benefits:
This section contains general recommendations about how to instrument your application. For guidance that is specific to Google Cloud, see Choose an instrumentation approach.
To collect metrics, we recommend that you use OpenTelemetry or Prometheus:
OpenTelemetry is an open source project that provides a unified framework for application instrumentation. It also provides instrumentation libraries for popular libraries. OpenTelemetry provides a standalone agent, the OpenTelemetry Collector, that can receive, transform, and export telemetry. The OpenTelemetry Collector configuration file determines the behavior of the OpenTelemetry Collector. To send telemetry to an agent or directly to a storage system, use the OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP).
Prometheus is a popular open source monitoring system. You can use the Prometheus client libraries to generate metrics from your application, and there is a third-party ecosystem of instrumentation libraries for popular frameworks. Prometheus clients expose their metrics as an HTTP endpoint that can be scraped by an agent.
To collect traces, we recommend that you use OpenTelemetry.
To collect logs, we recommend that you use a framework which can be configured to output JSON-structured logs for Cloud Logging. For writing log data, we recommend the following:
Google Cloud solutionsGoogle Cloud Observability provides flexible options for collecting telemetry:
For code samples that illustrate how to instrument your application to send telemetry to Google Cloud, see the following:
To learn how to collect and view latency data from your applications, see View latency of app requests.
For information about Google Cloud's fully managed, multi-cloud, cross-project solution for Prometheus, see Google Cloud Managed Service for Prometheus.
For information about how to configure the Ops Agent, see the following documents:
For more information about Google Cloud Observability, see Observability in Google Cloud.
Except as otherwise noted, the content of this page is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License, and code samples are licensed under the Apache 2.0 License. For details, see the Google Developers Site Policies. Java is a registered trademark of Oracle and/or its affiliates.
Last updated 2025-08-11 UTC.
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