GCP is great but we couldn’t find a way to get logs to go anywhere but to StackDriver and it being so expensive we had to jump ship because of it. Basically try as we might all the pods that ran our containers had stderror and stdout hijacked by StackDriver
You mention pods so are you talking about GKE clusters? If so, Stackdriver integration is just another service installed when you setup your cluster (using fluentd as the agent). There's also an updated beta version of this monitoring, but you can disable all of it easily in the GKE console with a few clicks.
Container output isn't hijacked, it's all logged to files, and those files are tailed by the logging agents. You can run multiple logging agents, for example we use https://logdna.com/ (highly recommended) and it works fine in addition to stackdriver logs.
Ok this might be embarrassing to admit but when we used GKE about 8 months ago we tried to do this but we couldn’t get our own logging to get anything from the pods. Maybe the tech lead was biased and wanted to go to AWS all along. I’ll have to take another look at it because I liked the service. What I didn’t like is that I on many occasions saught help from Google but got no response. We didn’t pay for support but just an email a few days later from support showing the methods to disable it and maybe a look into why our on cluster logging tools weren’t ingesting anything would have been nice.
What support did you contact if you weren't paying? Support isn't perfect but I find it hard to believe you got no response at all. Staff and community is also active on the gce-discussion [1] group and StackOverflow [2].
