Cloud Pro: Google Cloud Management and Monitoring: Choose, Compare and Launch

What's inside

1. Level 1: The Google Cloud Ops Map: Every Service on One PageFree
   Learners put every Google Cloud management and monitoring service on one page in seven groups (monitoring and logging, tracing, infrastructure as code, configuration and patching, inventory and governance, cost, advice and health), together with each service's current and former names, such as Stackdriver becoming Cloud Monitoring and Cloud Logging, and OS Config sitting behind VM Manager.
2. Level 2: Building the Standard Operations ProfileFree
   Learners fill in a reusable operations profile covering estate size and environments, telemetry volume and retention, SLOs and alerting, IaC and change control, patching, cost allocation, guardrails, team skills and cost model, and use it as the input for every service decision later in the course.
3. Level 3: Cloud Monitoring: Metrics, Dashboards and Alerting
   A nine-part deep dive on Cloud Monitoring: built-in and custom metrics, uptime checks, alerting policies, dated quotas and retention limits, how metric ingestion and API calls are priced, and a quick start that creates an alert and an uptime check with gcloud and Terraform and then cleans them up.
4. Level 4: Cloud Logging: Ingestion, Buckets, Sinks and Retention
   A nine-part deep dive on Cloud Logging: the Log Router, sinks, log buckets, exclusions, Log Analytics, dated limits, pricing per GB ingested and per GB retained beyond the default period, and a quick start that routes logs to a custom bucket with gcloud and Terraform and then cleans up.
5. Level 5: Cloud Trace and Cloud Profiler for Latency and CPU
   A nine-part deep dive on Cloud Trace and Cloud Profiler: OpenTelemetry instrumentation, sampling, span ingestion pricing and limits, the low-overhead continuous profiler, who operates what, and a quick start that sends traces and profiles from a small service and then cleans up.
6. Level 6: Managed Service for Prometheus: PromQL Without the Ops
   A nine-part deep dive on Google Cloud Managed Service for Prometheus: managed versus self-deployed collection, Monarch-backed global storage, per-sample pricing and cardinality traps, dated limits, the split between what you run and what Google runs, and a quick start on GKE with gcloud and Terraform followed by clean-up.
7. Level 7: Infrastructure Manager: Managed Terraform on Google Cloud
   A nine-part deep dive on Infrastructure Manager: how it runs Terraform for you with managed state and Cloud Build execution, its revisions and previews, supported Terraform versions and other dated limits, pricing levers, and a quick start that deploys and deletes a small configuration with gcloud.
8. Level 8: Config Connector: Google Cloud Resources as Kubernetes Objects
   A nine-part deep dive on Config Connector: managing Google Cloud resources as Kubernetes custom resources with continuous reconciliation, the GKE add-on versus manual install, resource coverage and other dated limits, cost, operating burden, and a quick start that creates and deletes a bucket through kubectl.
9. Level 9: Deployment Manager's Retirement and Migrating Off It
   Learners deal with Cloud Deployment Manager, which reached end of support on 31 March 2026: they find remaining Jinja and Python templates and move them to Terraform with the DM Convert tool, so they can run on Infrastructure Manager or another IaC tool.
10. Level 10: Cloud Asset Inventory: Know What You Run
    A nine-part deep dive on Cloud Asset Inventory: searching resources and IAM policies across an organization, exporting to BigQuery or Cloud Storage, real-time feeds, dated retention and quota limits, cost (including the BigQuery side), and a quick start that searches, exports and sets up a feed with gcloud and Terraform.
11. Level 11: VM Manager (OS Config): Patching and Inventory at Scale
    A nine-part deep dive on VM Manager, built on the OS Config API: the OS Config agent, OS inventory, patch jobs and recurring patch deployments, OS policy assignments, dated limits, how pricing works per managed VM, and a quick start that patches a test VM and then cleans up.
12. Level 12: Cloud Billing Reports, Budgets and FinOps Hub
    A nine-part deep dive on Cloud Billing's reports, budgets with Pub/Sub notifications, BigQuery billing export and FinOps hub's savings and utilization view: what each one shows, how late the data arrives, the dated limits, and a quick start that creates a budget and export with gcloud and Terraform.
13. Level 13: Recommender and Active Assist: Acting on Advice
    A nine-part deep dive on Recommender and the Active Assist portfolio: recommendation and insight types such as idle resources, rightsizing and IAM, how to read and change recommendation states through the API, limits and cost, and a quick start that lists, exports and applies a recommendation.
14. Level 14: Personalized Service Health: Provider Incidents That Matter
    A nine-part deep dive on Personalized Service Health: incident events filtered to the products and locations you actually use, alerting through Cloud Monitoring, the API and log integrations, dated limits, and a quick start that sends a provider-incident alert to the on-call channel.
15. Level 15: Organization Policy in Brief: Guardrails for Ops
    A short recap of Organization Policy from an operations angle (the full treatment was in the security course): managed and custom constraints, inheritance down the hierarchy, dry-run mode, and the handful of constraints that most affect monitoring, logging, IaC and cost.
16. Level 16: SLOs and Actionable Alerts
    Learners turn the profile's reliability targets into service-level indicators and objectives in Cloud Monitoring, then replace noisy threshold alerts with multi-window burn-rate alerts that only page when the error budget is really at risk.
17. Level 17: IaC Change Control and Drift Detection
    Learners design a change pipeline for Terraform and Config Connector, with plan review, policy checks, protected state and approval gates, and set up drift detection that compares deployed state, Cloud Asset Inventory and the code.
18. Level 18: Labels, Tags and Cost Allocation
    Learners design a labelling and tagging scheme that serves both cost allocation and policy, enforce it through IaC and Organization Policy, and check in the billing export that every pound or dollar can be traced to a team, environment and product.
19. Level 19: FinOps in Practice: Commitments and Rightsizing
    Learners run a FinOps cycle on a sample estate: rightsizing from Recommender and FinOps hub data, choosing between resource-based and spend-based committed use discounts against sustained usage, and tracking savings over time with concrete numbers.
20. Level 20: Operations at Scale Across Many Projects
    Learners set up observability, inventory, patching and cost controls across hundreds of projects using folders, metrics scopes, aggregated log sinks, organization-level asset exports, project factories and per-project quotas, without making any one team a bottleneck.
21. Level 21: Worked Telemetry Cost: A Small Estate
    Work out a month of observability cost for a small estate of two environments and a few dozen VMs and services, using dated list prices for log ingestion and retention, metric volume, Prometheus samples, traces and API calls.
22. Level 22: Worked Telemetry Cost: A Large Multi-Project Estate
    Run the same costing for a large estate of hundreds of projects with GKE fleets, central log sinks and long audit retention, and see which cost items grow faster than the estate itself.
23. Level 23: Telemetry Cost Sensitivity and Break-Even Points
    Stress-test both cost models to find the volumes where a design choice changes, such as Prometheus versus custom metrics, routing logs to BigQuery or Cloud Storage instead of log buckets, or sampling instead of full capture.
24. Level 24: Building a Weighted Selection Scorecard
    Turn the operations profile from level 2 into a weighted scorecard with criteria, weights, scoring rules and must-pass gates that can rate any set of Google Cloud management and monitoring services the same way.
25. Level 25: Gathering Dated Evidence From Another Cloud
    Collect comparable, dated evidence for a second cloud's monitoring, logging, IaC, inventory, patching, cost and advice services, mapping each one to its nearest Google Cloud equivalent without assuming they match feature for feature.
26. Level 26: Scoring Google Cloud Against Another Cloud
    Apply the weighted scorecard to Google Cloud and the second cloud side by side using the dated evidence and both telemetry cost models, then explain the result honestly, including where it is close or depends on assumptions.
27. Level 27: Final Challenge: Decision Workshop and Selection Record Exam
    Run a full decision workshop on a new estate, using everything in the course from the service map and profile to the deep dives, practice, cost models and cross-cloud scoring, and finish with a one-page selection record that stands up to review.

Access

The first 2 levels are free with a free account. Every level, the podcast edition and the AI tutor come with All Access at £4.99/month or any Creator plan — see pricing.

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