Disable Stackdriver monitoring agent

[ron weasledye]

Hi Community Members & GCE Supports

TLDR, goto `# Questions` section.

# Background & Info:

I was still testing GCE and using Free Tier first before jumping all in on GCE, using the smallest GCE instance

```

Current machine type:  f1-micro (1 vCPU, 0.6 GB memory)
```

Running Debian Linux, installed few programming languages and web server it went fine and smooth, just like regular VM.
Based on Cloud Console CPU load was minimum less than 3% on idle and less than 50% on load (it just personal webserver so not much visitor)

However, when I was exploring Cloud Console I was getting popup recommending to install something like Stackdriver Monitoring Agent, so I did follow the instructions to Install. I can see the monitoring logs, chart, etc coming in to Google StackDriver dashboard.

# Issue:

AFTER INSTALLING Stackdriver Monitoring Agent, my idle CPU load was always over 8% and now it goes beyond 10%. 

I don't like this, it seems like my VM always on a constant load just for logging and monitoring! That was not expected!

I go over GCE tech docs, internet, stackoverflow, etc, even this mailing list and googling around about how to uninstall/disable Stackdriver but found nothing close, my closest finding is how to stop Stackdriver for K8s cluster on GCE which is not applicable for my case.

# Questions:

How can I stop/disable/uninstall Stackdriver Monitoring Agent on my Debian based f1-micro GCE machine?

tried to stop/disable the service, but it got autostarted again :(

I know, there's a lot getting logged constantly and the agent might not optimized for small VMs, but that is not acceptable to make it hard to just disable/uninstall that thing :(

Thanks in advance.

[James Richard Boa (Google Cloud Platform Support)]

Hello Ron,

You can disable the Stackdriver agent by running the command[1] below for your VM:

sudo apt-get purge stackdriver-agent

[1] https://cloud.google.com/monitoring/agent/install-agent#remove