Google Cloud Platform (GCP) provides audit logs that record the who, where, and when of activity within an environment, enabling administrators to monitor access and detect potential threats across resources such as storage buckets, databases, service accounts, and virtual machines. GCP collects audit logs from all services, providing context for security analysis. The Google Cloud hierarchy organizes resources by organization, project, and folder, which is essential for interpreting audit logs. Best practices include granting access to resources using Cloud IAM policies and understanding the roles of individual users and services within the hierarchy. The three types of audit logs are Admin Activity, System Event, and Data Access, each recording different levels of activity. Data Access logs require explicit enablement due to their potentially large volume. Understanding how to interpret audit log entries is crucial for monitoring GCP security and detecting potential vulnerabilities. Critical log events include unauthorized access attempts, new service account creation, and modifications to sinks or Pub/Sub topics. Monitoring these logs can help identify security threats and ensure compliance with frameworks such as CIS Benchmarks. The Cloud Logging API and the `gcloud` command-line tool can be used to export audit logs to external monitoring services like Datadog. Datadog provides turnkey integrations for GCP and Google Workspace, automatically parsing audit logs and enriching them with contextual information. Users can build custom dashboards to get a high-level view of log activity and use Datadog's built-in threat detection rules to identify critical security issues in their environments.