Google Cloud Operations, formerly known as Stackdriver, is a suite of tools provided by Google Cloud Platform (GCP) to monitor, troubleshoot, and operate cloud deployments. It’s designed to enhance the observability of cloud applications, offering various services like monitoring, logging, and diagnostics.

Here are some of the key features and capabilities of Google Cloud Operations:

1. Cloud Monitoring: This feature checks the viability of cloud resources and applications, providing visibility into metrics such as CPU use, disk I/O, memory, network traffic, uptime, and custom metrics. It’s based on collectd, an open-source daemon that gathers system and application performance data. Cloud Monitoring allows users to receive customizable alerts and monitor resources such as Google Compute Engine and EC2 VMs.

2. Cloud Logging: Offers real-time Log Management and analysis for cloud applications. It allows you to store, search, analyze, monitor, and alert on log data from GCP and AWS. Cloud Logging includes a centralized error management interface and supports a variety of external and internal cloud services.

3. Cloud Debugger: Inspects the state of an application deployed in Google App Engine or Google Compute Engine without affecting its performance. It enables you to take snapshots of an application’s state and link it to a specific line in the source code.

4. Cloud Trace: Collects network latency data from applications deployed in Google App Engine and helps identify network bottlenecks.

5. Cloud Profiler: Continuously monitors resource-intensive functions across applications and identifies inefficient code, assisting in performance optimization.

Google Cloud Operations is natively integrated with GCP and can also pull performance data from open-source systems like Cassandra, Nginx, Prometheus, and Elasticsearch. It’s used for infrastructure monitoring and application troubleshooting, helping cloud administrators, engineers, and developers maintain efficient cloud applications and environments.

For more detailed information about Google Cloud Operations, you can refer to TechTarget’s overview of Google Cloud Operations​​, VerSprite’s detailed examination of the key features of Google Stackdriver​​, and The New Stack’s closer look into Google Stackdriver​​.