Google Compute Engine (GCE) is a cloud platform service that provides on-demand virtual machines, allowing for easily scalable infrastructure. Launched in 2013, GCE has become a serious alternative to AWS EC2 and has been adopted by major companies such as Spotify. To effectively monitor GCE instances, Datadog collects performance metrics, providing targeted alerts, correlated events, and insights into instance activity, health, and performance. The integration offers status checks, CPU usage tracking, throughput metrics for I/O, network, and saturation, and automatically tags metrics with instance type, host name, availability zone, and more. With this integration, users can slice and dice their metrics, filter and group hosts, and utilize advanced features like host maps, outlier detection, and alerting mechanisms to investigate performance issues. The integration is available for existing Datadog users and can be signed up for a free trial to start monitoring GCE instances immediately.