What do you mean? 5 terabytes is so little that I forgot how to count that low

Eh, it has, though.

Half of it is about setting up a bigtable for hosting the data. I don't know of any team that's set up a new bigtable in the past 5 years; if you're really going all-in on the cloud ecosystem (per AppEngine) you'll stick it in Google Cloud Storage (where you'll note the file size limit is... 5 TiB) and call it a day. (Also: PCR zones are basically dead.)

The other half is about setting up monitoring, where the mentioned choices are Diplomat (which I don't think anyone's used in about a decade) and Borgmon (which is barely staffed and strongly, strongly discouraged for any new use cases). Borgmon readability hasn't been enforced in years. And again, if you're spinning this up in GCP, just set up some cloud monitoring.

Borgmon readability was my... least favorite readability.

Is 'monarch' still a thing? It was newish around the time that I left.

Monarch is very much still the recommended monitoring backend.

But Monarch is the backend, so people rarely interact with it. As of the time I left Google, the UI is automon, the language to write alert rules in is gmon, the language to do interactive exploration in is mash, and the CLI to interact with retentions and metrics etc is monarch_tool. It didn't matter if the backend was Monarch or not.

Sure. Most engineers will probably poke around on the UI to look at graphs, and write any special monitoring configs in GMon (a DSL in Python, which is then transpiled to mash). Directly interacting with monarch_tool should be rare, as monitoring integration with rollout automation is also provided by default.

Further, the entire point of automon is to automatically generate common monitoring dashboards, which you should expect to be sufficient if you're creating a bog-standard setup.

> It didn't matter if the backend was Monarch or not.

It totally does. Borgmon has a totally different data model, a custom query language, its own UI, and various quirks along the way. To add insult to injury, it was a very real thing where if you wanted to set up new monitoring, you needed to get someone with Borgmon readability to approve your change (that requirement has since been lifted). Meanwhile, today, you don't need anyone with Python readability to ever look at your GMon code.

You can have Automon graphs that fetch from Borgmon under the hood, but everything else that you've described is 100% Monarch-specific.

It’s so bad, still.