Your organization must retain application metrics for five years for potential legal analysis. Which approach satisfies this retention requirement?

The correct option is to configure Stackdriver Monitoring for all Projects and export to Google Cloud Storage. Stackdriver Monitoring (now Cloud Monitoring) has default retention policies that are typically much shorter than five years (e.g., 24 months for metrics). To meet a five-year retention requirement, you need to export the data to a service with long-term storage capabilities. Google Cloud Storage is ideal for this, offering cost-effective, durable storage with configurable retention policies that can easily exceed five years. Granting the security team access to logs in each project doesn't address the retention period for metrics, as logs and metrics are distinct, and logs also have default retention limits. Configuring Stackdriver Monitoring with default retention policies will not meet the five-year requirement. Exporting to BigQuery is an option for long-term storage and analysis, but for raw metric data archival, Cloud Storage is generally a more direct and cost-effective solution for simply meeting a retention period, especially if complex querying of the raw historical metrics isn't the primary goal.