Google Cloud Platform: how to monitor memory usage of VM instances

Solution 1:

By installing the Stackdriver agent in GCE VMs additional metrics like memory can be monitored. Stackdriver also offers you alerting and notification features. Nevertheless agent metrics are only available for premium tier accounts.

See this answer for Dataproc VMs.

Solution 2:

The stackdriver agent only supports monitoring of RAM of the E2 family at the moment. Other instance types such as N1, N2,... are not supported.

See the latest documentation of what is supported; https://cloud.google.com/monitoring/api/metrics_gcp#gcp-compute

Solution 3:

Well you can use the /proc/meminfo virtual file system to get information on current memory usage. You can create a simple bash script that reads the memory usage information from /proc/meminfo. The script can be run periodically as a cron job service. The script can send an alert email if the memory usage exceeds a given threshold.

See this link: https://pakjiddat.netlify.app/posts/monitoring-cpu-and-memory-usage-on-linux