GCP - Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer Study Guide

4: Implementing observability practices and troubleshooting issues

This chapter builds the observability substrate that powers the Site Reliability Engineering practices from the prior chapter. It walks through log collection with the Ops Agent, OpenTelemetry, VPC Flow Logs, and Cloud Service Mesh; the routing layer of log sinks and aggregated organization-level sinks; log-based metrics and uptime checks; sensitive-data redaction; log retention and cost management; export patterns to BigQuery, Pub/Sub, and Cloud Storage; Log Analytics; and custom metrics that feed alerting policies including SLO burn-rate alerts.