OpenObserve offers two primary collection methods:

1. Cloud Logging export to Pub/Sub: Collect logs from GCP services by creating a sink in Cloud Logging that exports to a Pub/Sub topic. This method supports all standard GCP log types, including audit logs, VPC flow logs, and application logs.
2. OpenTelemetry collector: Deploy the collector via Terraform to gather metrics and traces. The collector can be configured to collect both platform metrics and custom application metrics.

OpenObserve supports monitoring for core GCP services including but not limited to:

• Compute Engine: VM instance metrics, system logs, and application logs
• Cloud Run: Request logs, container metrics, and deployment events
• Cloud Functions: Execution logs, performance metrics, and invocation data
• Cloud SQL: Database metrics, error logs, and query insights
• Load Balancer: Request logs, latency metrics, and traffic distribution
• VPC Flow Logs: Network traffic analysis and security monitoring
• Cloud Audit Logs: Track administrative activities and data access

For Cloud Logging export:

1. Create a Cloud Logging sink to define which logs to export
2. Configure Pub/Sub export with appropriate IAM permissions
3. Set up OpenObserve integration with your Pub/Sub subscription
4. Verify data flow and configure log parsing rules

For OpenTelemetry:

1. Deploy collector using Terraform with provided configuration templates
2. Configure authentication using service accounts
3. Enable metric collection for desired services
4. Set up metric filters and aggregation rules

OpenObserve processes logs with:

• Built-in log parsing for standard GCP log formats
• SQL-based querying for complex log analysis
• Structured data support for JSON and other formats
• Timestamp processing with timezone handling
• Field extraction and indexing for efficient searches
• Automatic metadata enrichment

OpenObserve provides:

• SQL query support with aggregations and joins
• Time-series analysis with customizable time windows
• Log search and filtering with full-text capabilities
• Metric aggregations with statistical functions
• Custom dashboards for visualization
• Alert configuration based on queries