Google’s Stackdriver cloud monitoring tool is nearing general availability, and although it’s expected to remain in testing for a couple of months, pricing details have already been published.

For those who don’t know Stackdriver, Google describes it as a unified monitoring, logging and diagnostics service for managing workloads on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Amazon Web Services (AWS). It’s a bit like remote monitoring and management (RMM) only for cloud computing.

The service has been available in beta since last March, but Google recently revealed how much it intends to charge users for it. Interestingly, Stackdriver’s pricing plan hints at Google’s vision of empowering lay users to embrace cloud computing in an easy way that’s no more difficult than playing with a few spreadsheets.

“By integrating monitoring, logging and diagnostics, Google Stackdriver makes ops easier for the hybrid cloud, equipping customers with insight into the health, performance and availability of their applications,” said Google product manager Dan Belcher in a recent blog post. “We’re unifying these services into a single package, which makes Google Stackdriver affordable, easy-to-use, and flexible.”

Stackdriver pricing

For now the service is available as a free beta, but once that testing period ends users will be able to opt for a “free” or “premium” version of the tool. The free plan naturally only gives users a taste of Stackdriver, being limited to GCP workloads only and providing key metrics, traces, error reports and up to 5 GBs a month of logs.

The premium plan is altogether more confusing, as cloud pricing has become famous for. The service is available for $8 per monitored resource, per month, pro-rated hourly. The package also includes 10 GBs of storage per month, 30 days of log retention, text message alerts, access to Slack, Hipchat, PagerDuty and other tools, and also integration with AWS.

Once the free beta period ends, Google will give new users one month’s access to the premium version for free.

Cloud computing made easy?

The overarching goal of Google Stackdriver is to make its cloud services easier to use and monitor, and comes at a time when its main rivals are also maneuvering in that direction. For example, AWS recently announced its Cloud With Me tool, a new service that aims to reduce the complexity of setting up virtual machines.

Then there’s Microsoft, which stated that greater simplicity was one of the chief reasons to make Azure Stack available as an appliance. At its recent Worldwide Partner Conference in Toronto, Microsoft said Azure Stack would be released as a turnkey bundle in order to “reduce the complexity and improve the odds of Azure Stack working well”. Disappointingly though, Microsoft also said the release of Azure Stack would be delayed until next year.

Of course, it’ll be a while yet before any old small business owner will be able to fire up public cloud services and manage their own computing and storage without any kind of specialist training, but the trend suggests that the biggest public cloud providers are determined to make it happen at some point.

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