External metrics list

This document lists some of the metric types available from open-source projects and other external sources.

• For a general explanation of the entries in the tables, including information about values like DELTA and GAUGE, see Metric types.

• For information about the units used in the metric lists, see the unit field in the MetricDescriptor reference.

• For information about statements of the form “Sampled every x seconds” and “After sampling, data is not visible for up to y seconds”, see Additional information: metadata.

• The resource-hierarchy level tells you if the metric is written at the project, organization, or folder level(s). When the level is not specified in the metric descriptor, the metric writes at the project level by default.

• For information about the meaning of launch stages such as GA (General Availability) and BETA (Preview), see Product launch stages.

external.googleapis.com

Metrics sent to Google Cloud projects with a metric type beginning external.googleapis.com are known as external metrics. The metrics are typically exported by open-source projects and third-party providers. There is presently a limit of 25,000 external metric descriptors per Google Cloud project.

Cloud Monitoring treats external metrics the same as custom metrics, with one exception. For external metrics, a resource_type of global is invalid and results in the metric data being discarded.

External metric descriptors that are created but then not used for at least 24 months are subject to deletion.

Note: Until an external metric is used in a project, there is no metric descriptor for it. This is also true of custom metrics. Therefore, this document cannot list information about all the possible external metric types. If you use external metrics in your project, you can look at their metric descriptors using the metricDescriptors.list or metricDescriptors.get Monitoring API methods.

user

external.googleapis.com/user/ is a valid domain for user-defined metrics. It is functionally identical to custom.googleapis.com, although it has some backend optimizations that make queries perform better at scale. If you have many projects with identical metrics in every project, then you should use the external.googleapis.com/user/ prefix instead of custom.googleapis.com for performance reasons.

vmware/vcenter

Metrics whose names begin external.googleapis.com/vmware/vcenter/ come from Google Cloud VMware Engine environments that are running the standalone GCVE agent to collect and send metrics to Cloud Monitoring. For a list of metrics that the agent can collect, see List of collected metrics.

prometheus

Metrics whose names begin external.googleapis.com/prometheus/ come from Prometheus, an open-source monitoring tool often used with Kubernetes. When you configure Prometheus with Stackdriver Prometheus sidecar (deprecated), metrics exported by Prometheus are converted to Cloud Monitoring metric types with simple metric descriptors, such as the following:

{
  "name": "projects/my-gcp-project/metricDescriptors/external.googleapis.com/prometheus/apiserver_client_certificate_expiration_seconds",
  "metricKind": "CUMULATIVE",
  "valueType": "DISTRIBUTION",
  "description": "Auto-created custom metric.",
  "type": "external.googleapis.com/prometheus/apiserver_client_certificate_expiration_seconds"
}

If you are using the sidecar to ingest Prometheus metrics, then we recommend migrating to Google Cloud Managed Service for Prometheus.

Other metrics

Metrics from other domains.

The following list was last generated at 2026-07-30 20:23:33 UTC. For more information about this process, see About the lists.

Generated at 2026-07-30 20:23:33 UTC.