Google Cloud Observability release notes

A chart on a dashboard can override the dashboard's time-range setting. This feature lets you view trends over a long period or metric data with low sampling rates alongside charts that show only recent data, and is Generally Available (GA).

For more information, see the following documents:

• Google Cloud console: Set a time-range override for a chart or group
• API: Dashboard with an XyChart widget that sets a time-range override

The Observability API supports VPC Service Controls. This integration is generally available.

For more information, see the following:

• Use VPC Service Controls with Google Cloud Observability
• Observability API overview
• Supported products: Observability API

You can opt out of alert notifications from an SMS notification channel by sending a text message to the phone number associated with the notification channel. For more information, see Opt out of SMS notifications.

Starting August 31, 2026, you can no longer create or edit trace sinks. Trace sinks were deprecated on February 18, 2026. For more information, see Export trace spans with sinks deprecation.

For information about how to analyze your trace data using SQL, see the following documents:

• Query and analyze traces using Observability Analytics
• Query a linked BigQuery dataset

The following remote MCP server automatically generates a trace span for tools/call operations.

• Datastream

These spans can help you understand the behavior of your agentic applications. For more information, see Investigate MCP calls using Trace.

VM Extension Manager extension policies for the Ops Agent are Generally Available (GA). Extension policies provide zonal and project-wide Ops Agent installation, version upgrades, and configuration management. For more information, see Install and manage the Ops Agent by using VM Extension Manager policies.

VM Extension Manager extension policies for the Ops Agent are Generally Available (GA). Extension policies provide zonal and project-wide Ops Agent installation, version upgrades, and configuration management. For more information, see Install and manage the Ops Agent by using VM Extension Manager policies.

You can update the display name, description, and Cloud KMS key applied to a _Trace observability bucket.

For more information, see Update observability buckets.

You can manually create the _Trace observability bucket before your project receives trace data. When creating the bucket, you must specify a storage location. Google Cloud Observability applies the Cloud KMS key defined in your default settings unless you explicitly specify a different key in your create request.

For more information, see the following documents:

• Create observability buckets
• Set defaults for observability buckets

The following remote MCP servers automatically generate a trace span for tools/call operations.

• Policy Troubleshooter
• Managed Service for Apache Airflow

These spans can help you understand the behavior of your agentic applications. For more information, see Investigate MCP calls using Trace.

The following limits associated with the Cloud Trace API, cloudtrace.googleapis.com, have increased:

• Maximum attributes per span: 1,024
• Maximum attribute value size: 65,532 bytes
• Maximum attribute key size: 512 bytes
• Maximum span name length: 1,024 bytes
• Maximum events per span: 256

The new limits are consistent with those supported by the Telemetry API, which implements the OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP).

For more information, see Cloud Trace API quotas and limits.

The Telemetry API for logs ingestion is generally available (GA). You can ingest OTLP logs into Cloud Logging by using an OpenTelemetry Collector, an OTLP exporter, and the Telemetry API. For more information, see OTLP ingestion overview.

Error Reporting can report stack traces collected from Rust applications using std::backtrace. To enable, set the RUST_BACKTRACE=1 environment variable and make sure debug symbols are enabled.

For more information, see ReportedErrorEvent.

The following remote MCP servers automatically generate a trace span for tools/call operations. These spans can help you understand the behavior of your agentic applications. For more information, see Investigate MCP calls using Trace.

• Cloud Billing
• Personalized Service Health

Google Cloud Observability automatically generates trace exemplars for charts on custom dashboards that display the result of a SQL query when the query runs against your trace data and satisfies some constraints. The exemplars link the SQL query result to specific traces. This feature is in Preview.

For more information, see Generate and display trace exemplars.

The Telemetry API for metric ingestion is generally available (GA). You can ingest OTLP metrics into Cloud Monitoring by using an OpenTelemetry Collector, an OTLP exporter, and the Telemetry API. For more information, see OTLP metric ingestion overview.

Alerting policies based on PromQL queries can now operate over more than 25 hours of data. For more information, see Query over 2 years of metric data and Limits for alerting.

Google Cloud Observability has expanded the supported locations for observability buckets, which store your trace data, to include the following:

• europe-west9

For a list of supported locations, see Locations for observability buckets.

Support for applying role-based access controls (RBAC) to Cloud Monitoring dashboards and alerting policies using Tags is generally available.

You can use Tags to protect Terraform-managed Cloud Monitoring resources and configure team-scoped access. For more information, see Use Tags to control access to resources.

If the parent project for a Cloud Storage bucket changes, a log sink stops routing log entries to that bucket. For more information about error messages and recovery options, see Errors routing to Cloud Storage.

Metrics Explorer can automatically break down a chart into a series of tiles, with each displaying time-series data for a specific label key. This view helps you identify spikes, dips, or trends that the aggregation settings might otherwise hide.

To learn more, see Break down a chart by labels.

The Cloud Logging API adds support for the ca regional endpoint. For a complete list of regional endpoints, see the REST reference pages.

You can collect, view, and analyze multimodal prompts and responses from your agentic applications that use the LangGraph or Agent Development Kit (ADK) frameworks. This feature is generally available (GA).

• Instrument generative AI applications
• Collect and view multimodal prompts and responses

All agent.googleapis.com/processes metrics are retained for 24 months. For more information, see Data retention.

The Trace API supports regional endpoints. For a list of supported endpoints, see the REST API reference pages:

• v1 REST reference
• v2 REST reference

Custom dashboards can display trace data. You can view individual spans or aggregated data. This feature is public preview. For more information, see the following:

• Display trace data (Google Cloud console)
• Dashboard with trace data (API)

Custom dashboards can display trace data. You can view individual spans or aggregated data. This feature is public preview. For more information, see Display traces on a custom dashboard.

To view the instrumentation scope or the schema associated with a span, open the Details view for the span and select the Metadata & Links tab. For more information, see View attributes, log entries, and events.

Support for Histogram widgets on custom dashboards is generally available. These widgets extract the most recent value from each time series, group those values into ranges, and then provide a graphical representation of the result. Unlike tables or other widgets that display the most recent values, Histograms display information about the relative frequency of ranges of values.

This widget is one of several visualizations that you can use to display the most recent values. For more information, see the following documents: