GCP Cloud Monitoring

Monitor Google Cloud infrastructure via the Cloud Monitoring MCP server — query time series metrics, inspect alert policies, check active alerts, and discover available metric types.

MCP Server

• Endpoint: https://monitoring.googleapis.com/mcp (Streamable HTTP)
• Auth: OAuth 2.0 via Google IAM — service account key (GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS) or gcloud auth application-default login
• Requires: GCP_PROJECT_ID environment variable

Available Tools (6)

Tool	What It Does
list_timeseries	Query time series data — CPU, memory, network, disk metrics for any GCP resource
list_metric_descriptors	Discover available metric types in a project — find what you can monitor
list_alert_policies	List all alerting policies — conditions, notification channels, thresholds
get_alert_policy	Get details of a specific alerting policy
list_alerts	List current and past alert violations — what's firing right now
get_alert	Get details of a specific alert violation

Workflow: GCP Network Monitoring

When a user asks "how is our GCP network performing?":

1. Check alerts: list_alerts to find any active alert violations
2. VM network metrics: list_timeseries for compute.googleapis.com/instance/network/received_bytes_count and sent_bytes_count
3. Packet drops: list_timeseries for compute.googleapis.com/instance/network/received_packets_dropped_count
4. Firewall metrics: list_timeseries for compute.googleapis.com/firewall/dropped_packets_count
5. Load balancer metrics: list_timeseries for loadbalancing.googleapis.com/https/request_count and total_latencies
6. Report: Network health dashboard with any issues flagged

Workflow: Alert Investigation

When investigating GCP alerts:

1. List active alerts: list_alerts — find what's currently firing
2. Get alert details: get_alert — condition, threshold, resource affected
3. Get policy: get_alert_policy — what triggers this alert, notification channels
4. Pull metrics: list_timeseries for the affected metric — see the spike/anomaly
5. Cross-reference: Use gcp-cloud-logging for correlated log entries
6. Report: Alert investigation with root cause and timeline

Workflow: Resource Health Check

When checking GCP infrastructure health:

1. Discover metrics: list_metric_descriptors filtered by service (compute, networking, loadbalancing)
2. VM CPU/Memory: list_timeseries for compute.googleapis.com/instance/cpu/utilization and memory metrics
3. Disk I/O: list_timeseries for compute.googleapis.com/instance/disk/read_bytes_count and write metrics
4. Network throughput: list_timeseries for network sent/received bytes
5. Alert status: list_alert_policies + list_alerts — any policies in violation?
6. Report: Infrastructure health dashboard with severity ratings

Common GCP Network Metrics

Metric	What It Tells You
compute.googleapis.com/instance/network/received_bytes_count	Inbound network throughput per VM
compute.googleapis.com/instance/network/sent_bytes_count	Outbound network throughput per VM
compute.googleapis.com/instance/network/received_packets_dropped_count	Dropped inbound packets (congestion)
compute.googleapis.com/instance/network/sent_packets_dropped_count	Dropped outbound packets (congestion)
compute.googleapis.com/firewall/dropped_packets_count	Packets dropped by VPC firewall rules
loadbalancing.googleapis.com/https/request_count	HTTP(S) LB request rate
loadbalancing.googleapis.com/https/total_latencies	HTTP(S) LB end-to-end latency
loadbalancing.googleapis.com/https/backend_latencies	Backend response time behind LB
vpn.googleapis.com/tunnel_established	Cloud VPN tunnel state (1=up, 0=down)
vpn.googleapis.com/sent_bytes_count	Bytes sent through VPN tunnel
router.googleapis.com/bgp/received_routes_count	BGP routes received by Cloud Router
interconnect.googleapis.com/link/received_bytes_count	Cloud Interconnect link throughput

Important Rules

• Remote MCP server — hosted by Google, no local install needed
• OAuth 2.0 authentication — uses IAM for access control
• Project-scoped — metrics are scoped to the configured GCP project
• Read-only — monitoring queries don't modify anything
• Record in GAIT — log monitoring investigations for audit trail

Environment Variables

• GCP_PROJECT_ID — Google Cloud project ID
• GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS — Path to service account key JSON file