Google Inc. has just pushed out a major update to its integrated cloud monitoring, logging and diagnostics tool Stackdriver, which works with Google Compute Platform and Amazon Web Services.

With the update, Google said, it’s trying to make log analysis easier to perform, faster and more powerful. To that end, the company said it reduced the time it takes for a log entry made in the system to be reflected in Stackdriver’s metrics.

Before, it could take up to five minutes for new log entries to show up in Stackdriver. Now, it’s less than a minute. Although the five-minute lag wasn’t a major issue for most use cases, Google said the faster updates should still prove useful.

The update also means that developers can now use any field in a log entry as a label and get new data visualizations from those logs. In addition, developers can now set up something called exclusion filters in the logging application programming interface, providing them with greater control over what data gets ingested by their cloud applications.

“Exclusion filters allow you to reduce costs, improve the signal to noise ratio by reducing chatty logs, and manage compliance by blocking logs from a source or matching a pattern from being available in Stackdriver Logging,” Google product managers Mary Koes and Deepak Tiwari wrote in a blog post announcing the update.

Another new feature is that users can now carry out aggregated exports from multiple projects to services such as BigQuery, Google Cloud Storage and PubSub. Previously, users had to export data files to these services one-by-one, so the update should ensure much faster data analysis.

Google launched Stackdriver in March 2016 after acquiring the company of the same name that first built the tool in 2014. Stackdriver was originally designed to be used exclusively with AWS, which perhaps helps to explain why it’s still not compatible with Microsoft’s Azure cloud.

Image: Google