Which service can be used for real-time monitoring and alerting for application performance on cloud infrastructure?

Cloud Monitoring is the correct choice because it is specifically designed to provide real-time monitoring, alerting, and comprehensive visualization of the performance and health of applications running on cloud infrastructure. It allows developers to create custom dashboards that can visualize metrics from various sources, enabling them to monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) and system health. In addition, Cloud Monitoring integrates with alerting policies that notify users about performance issues or outages in real time, fostering proactive response to infrastructure problems.

While Stackdriver Trace, Cloud Profiler, and Cloud Logging are valuable tools in their own right, they serve different specific functions. Stackdriver Trace focuses primarily on latency tracking, helping developers analyze the time taken by requests to process and identify bottlenecks in application performance. Cloud Profiler assists in performance optimization insights by analyzing how CPU and memory are utilized by applications, but does not provide real-time monitoring or alerting capabilities. Cloud Logging is primarily used for storing log data for further analysis, but it does not inherently provide real-time monitoring or alerting about application performance.