You are responsible for deploying MariaDB SQL databases on Google Compute Engine (GCE) Virtual Machine (VM) instances and need to configure an efficient monitoring and alerting system. To achieve this, you need to collect essential metrics such as network connections, disk IO, and replication status from your MariaDB instances. With minimal development effort, you aim to utilize Google Cloud's StackDriver for creating dashboards and setting up alerts. What steps should you take to accomplish this?