By Craig Risi
Publication Date: 2026-03-03 12:00:00
Google Cloud recently unveiled broad support for the OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP) in Cloud Monitoring, marking a step toward unifying telemetry collection across its observability stack. With this rollout, users can now send metrics in OTLP format, alongside traces and logs, to Cloud Monitoring through a vendor-agnostic pipeline, enabling more flexible, standard-based instrumentation and simpler, more consistent telemetry ingestion.
The update builds on previous support for OTLP trace ingestion and underscores Google Cloud’s commitment to OpenTelemetry as a universal format and API for telemetry data. Developers can use OpenTelemetry SDKs to generate metrics, then send them via OTLP either directly to Cloud Monitoring or through an OpenTelemetry Collector. By default, ingested OTLP metrics are stored like Prometheus-formatted data and are fully queryable using standard Monitoring tools.
Support for OTLP metrics introduces several enhancements that improve observability…