What strategy should be followed to manage access to Cloud Monitoring in production environments while adhering to least privilege principles?

Creating a dedicated monitoring project for Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and attaching production projects is an effective strategy for managing access to Cloud Monitoring while adhering to least privilege principles. This approach isolates monitoring data within its own project, allowing you to precisely control who has access to that data.

By setting up a separate monitoring project, you can grant specific roles and permissions to users or teams depending on their needs and responsibilities. This segregates monitoring functions from production workloads and enables you to limit access to only those who truly require it, thereby minimizing the risk of exposing sensitive information or inadvertently allowing unwanted modifications.

This method facilitates clear oversight of monitoring access, enables customized access control policies for different teams or roles, and aligns neatly with the principle of least privilege, ensuring that users have only the permissions necessary to perform their duties.

Other strategies, such as granting read access to all GCP production projects or giving the Project Viewer IAM role broadly, do not support the principle of least privilege effectively as they might allow users access to more information or control than they need. Restricting monitoring access to specific team members might sound viable, but it could lead to operational inefficiencies if other necessary stakeholders are excluded from critical monitoring data.