---
title: "Google Cloud metrics | Grafana Cloud documentation"
description: "Learn how Grafana Alloy collects Google Cloud metrics and sends them to Grafana Cloud."
---

> For a curated documentation index, see [llms.txt](/llms.txt). For the complete documentation index, see [llms-full.txt](/llms-full.txt).

# Google Cloud metrics

Collect metrics from Google Cloud Monitoring with Grafana Alloy and send them to Grafana Cloud. Alloy includes an embedded GCP exporter, so you can collect metrics without deploying a separate exporter.

[How GCP metrics collection works](/media/docs/grafana-cloud/cloud-provider/GCP-Metrics.png)

## How collection works

The GCP exporter queries Google Cloud Monitoring for the projects and metric types you configure. Alloy then sends the collected metrics to Grafana Cloud, where you can explore them with Cloud Provider Observability.

You can configure Alloy to collect metrics from multiple projects. Use metric prefixes to choose which Google Cloud metric types to collect, and adjust the request interval to control how often Alloy queries Google Cloud Monitoring.

## Before you configure

The service account Alloy uses needs the `roles/monitoring.viewer` IAM role on each Google Cloud project you want to monitor. For the full prerequisites and setup steps, refer to [Configure GCP metrics](config-gcp-metrics/#before-you-begin).

## Next steps

- [Configure GCP metrics](config-gcp-metrics/) to select projects and metric types and start collection
- [View preconfigured dashboards and alerts](../dashboards-and-alerts/) to explore collected metrics