Question

Your team runs a fleet of Compute Engine VMs hosting a legacy Java application. In Cloud Monitoring dashboards you can see CPU utilization and network traffic for each VM, but memory utilization and disk usage metrics are missing, and you cannot build a memory-pressure alert. The VMs use a standard public Debian image. What is the most likely cause and the correct fix?

Accepted Answer

The default Compute Engine metrics only include hypervisor-visible signals; install and configure the Ops Agent on the VMs to collect guest-level memory and disk metrics.

Answer

The Cloud Monitoring metrics scope is misconfigured; add the project to a new metrics scope so guest memory metrics appear automatically.

Answer

Memory metrics require a log-based metric; create a log-based metric that parses /proc/meminfo entries from the VM serial console.

Answer

The VM service account lacks the roles/monitoring.viewer role; grant it so the built-in memory agent can publish guest metrics.