unit

The units in which the metric value is reported. It is only applicable if the valueType is INT64, DOUBLE, or DISTRIBUTION. The unit defines the representation of the stored metric values. Different systems may scale the values to be more easily displayed (so a value of 0.02KBy might be displayed as 20By, and a value of 3523KBy might be displayed as 3.5MBy). However, if the unit is KBy, then the value of the metric is always in thousands of bytes, no matter how it may be displayed. If you want a custom metric to record the exact number of CPU-seconds used by a job, you can create an INT64 CUMULATIVE metric whose unit is s{CPU} (or equivalently 1s{CPU} or just s). If the job uses 12,005 CPU-seconds, then the value is written as

Alternatively, if you want a custom metric to record data in a more granular way, you can create a DOUBLE CUMULATIVE metric whose unit is ks{CPU}, and then write the value 12.005 (which is 12005/1000), or use Kis{CPU} and write 11.723 (which is 12005/1024). The supported units are a subset of The Unified Code for Units of Measure standard. More info can be found in the API documentation (https://cloud.google.com/monitoring/api/ref_v3/rest/v3/projects.metricDescriptors).