Basically, their Cloud Tracing product is broken for modern Node/Postgres (in terms of showing PG queries and whatnot in traces), users have found the issue (and a seemingly super simple fix), but it’s been over a year and Google still haven’t fixed it. Google’s response is “yeah, we know pretty core functionality of this product is broken, but we’re not fixing it in the near future.” Or maybe ever? Many of their products feel semi-abandoned like this, especially in their observably stack - major bugs and/or performance issues that they never fix, and extremely limited features.

Cloud SQL isn’t terrible, but at least the Postgres version is one of the weaker managed Postgres offerings out there. And their whole observability stack (Logging/Monitoring/Tracing/Error Reporting) is legit terrible compared to competing products. Compared to other products I’ve used in the space, Cloud Logging is unbelievably worse than Sumo Logic, Cloud Metrics soooo much worse than Grafana+Prometheus, Cloud Tracing way worse than offerings from Datadog or New Relic, Cloud Error Reporting is ridiculously far behind Sentry, etc.

The GCP options are often quite cheap, but it shows in their extremely limited features, poor performance and plentiful bugs. Go with GCP for the things they do well, but don’t bother adopting their solution for everything simply to stick with one platform, as so many of their products are just so poor compared to competitors.