Handling query API quota exhaustion

Cloud Monitor provides a free monthly quota of 1 million API calls for querying monitoring data. When this quota is exceeded, Cloud Monitor throttles subsequent calls. Use this guide to identify and resolve quota exhaustion.

Symptoms

After exhausting the monthly 1 million API call quota, you receive email or SMS notifications on the first and fourth days. Throttling begins on the fifth day.
If an API response contains the message user api quota limit, your API calls are being throttled.

Causes

The following actions consume your query API quota:

Direct API calls.

Affected operations: DescribeMetricLast, DescribeMetricList, DescribeMetricData, and DescribeMetricTop. Calls made through the Cloud Monitor console do not count toward this quota.

Note
Calls to the 2018-03-08 versions of the QueryMetricList, QueryMetricLast, QueryMetricData, and QueryMetricTop API operations also consume the query API quota.
Using the Cloud Monitor Grafana plug-in.

View monitoring data by using a Grafana plug-in.

Solutions

If direct API calls exhausted your quota:
- Reduce API call frequency. For example, change from once per minute to once every five minutes.
- Reduce resources per batch API call.
  
  Query no more than 50 resources per batch. For example, in the DescribeMetricLast operation, set Dimensions to a value like [{instanceId:***},{instanceId:***},{instanceId:***}].
- Enable pay-as-you-go for Cloud Monitor Basic.
  
  Enable the pay-as-you-go billing method.
- Use Hybrid Cloud Monitoring real-time data export for low cost, low latency, and high reliability.
  
  Export monitoring data in real time.
If the Grafana plug-in exhausted your quota, switch to the Hybrid Cloud Monitoring dashboard feature.

Manage dashboards.