How to collect Google Compute Engine metrics

This article discusses how to monitor the health and performance of virtual machines in Google Compute Engine (GCE) using standard tools provided by Google. It covers accessing GCE metrics through Google's Stackdriver monitoring API, authentication methods such as service account authorization and user account authorization, querying the API, aggregating timeseries metrics, and using gcloud command line tool for day-to-day operations tasks. The article also briefly mentions Google's Stackdriver monitoring service that offers a simple interface for surfacing and alerting on GCE metrics.