Google Cloud's legacy Monitoring and Logging agents reached end of support on 28 September 2026: migrate to the Ops Agent

Google Cloud's legacy Monitoring and Logging agents reached end of support on 28 September 2026: migrate to the Ops Agent

28 September 2026 — Google Cloud's legacy Monitoring and Logging agents have reached end of support. Google's documentation states that as of 28 September 2026 the legacy agents have officially reached the end of their support: Google will release no new versions, and standard maintenance and bug fixes have stopped.

Not yet independently verified. This rests on Google's own documentation and release notes; no independent report was found. We will update this when it can be confirmed, and remove this note.

What this means

The legacy agents, the older Monitoring agent and Logging agent that many virtual machines on Compute Engine and other platforms still run to send metrics and logs to Google Cloud Observability, continue to exist on machines where they are installed, but they no longer receive fixes, including for new operating system versions or security issues. Google directs customers to the Ops Agent, which combines metrics and logs collection, or to the Google-built OpenTelemetry Collector.

In the same release notes, Google also marked the legacy management console for its Backup and DR appliance as deprecated, with new backups on the legacy stack ending after 30 September 2027.

Who is affected

Organisations running virtual machines on Google Cloud, or on other environments reporting to Google Cloud Observability, that still use the legacy agents; often older VMs built from images or configuration-management scripts written years ago.

What to do

1. Find VMs still running the legacy agents; Google provides tooling in the console and agent policies to list agent versions across a fleet.
2. Plan migration to the Ops Agent, or to the OpenTelemetry Collector if you are standardising on OpenTelemetry.
3. Check that dashboards, alerts and log-based metrics still work after migration, since metric names and log formats can differ.
4. Update VM images and automation so new machines do not install the legacy agents.
5. Prioritise internet-facing and regulated workloads, where unsupported software is a compliance finding.

Why it matters for buyers

Monitoring agents are rarely noticed until they break. Running an unsupported agent means blind spots in monitoring and an unpatched component on every machine. End-of-support dates for infrastructure software belong in the same tracking as operating system lifecycles.

Sources

• Google Cloud documentation: Legacy Monitoring and Logging agents end of support — 28 September 2026