Tight Leash on your Google Cloud Spend with the Cloud Billing Dashboard

The Cloud Billing dashboard provides a comprehensive overview of your current charges, along with estimated future charges based on your current usage. It also includes detailed reports that can help you better understand where your money is going.

It allows you to view your costs over time. You can select a specific date range to see how your costs have changed over time. This can be helpful for identifying trends in your usage and costs, and for forecasting future costs. The Cloud Billing dashboard helps you view your costs by project or service. This enables you to identify which projects or services are most costly, so you can make informed decisions about how to optimize your usage.

Reports allow you to view costs by service, project, and resource, giving you a clear picture of where your money is going. With the ability to download the report in various formats, it's easy to share with others and analyze in other tools. You can choose to include/exclude discounts, promotions and visualize your spend over any certain time period. You can set alerts to be sent when the amount spent exceeds a certain percentage of the budget amount. You can configure these alerts to be sent to a specific set of recipients via email. This section also allows you to forecast your cost and draws a cost trend line to show where your costs are headed and what’s the growth/decline % compared to the previously selected time period.

Cost Table allows you to analyze costs by different dimensions such as service, labels, location and so on. This gives you a more detailed breakdown of your spending, allowing you to make more targeted decisions on how to reduce costs. It allows you to see across multiple projects at once and break down into the SKUs in which you’re charged. You can customize the table configuration to generate different formats and download to share with your larger team.

Cost breakdown section gives you a waterfall-bar chart to visualize your total charges, credits and the usage cost. You can quickly see what portion of your cost is from spend based discounts, tax, promotions. It’s handy to quickly understand the composition of your hefty bill.

Budgets & Alerts allows you to set and monitor spend thresholds. On the "Create Budget" page, you will need to specify a name for your budget, the amount you would like to spend, either a target amount or based on last month’s spend, and the time period for which the budget will apply. The projects and services that has to be covered in the budget’s scope has to be included.

Keeping an eye on your Committed Use Discounts

Committed-use discounts in Google Cloud Platform (GCP) allow you to save money by committing to a certain amount of usage for a specific resource over a period of time. When making a Committed Use Discount (CUD) commitment, there are a few things to keep in mind to ensure that it makes sense for your usage and budget:

1. Resource Usage: Make sure you have a clear understanding of your current and projected usage of the specific resource for which you're making a commitment. You should commit to a usage level that you're confident you can maintain.
2. Commitment Period: CUD commitments are typically for a period of one or three years. Choose a commitment period that aligns with your usage and budget projections.
3. Savings: CUD commitments can result in significant savings, but consider the trade-offs between the savings and the commitment period.
4. Flexibility: Consider how flexible your usage will be before making a commitment. If you're uncertain about your future usage, it might be better to avoid making a commitment, so you can adjust your usage and costs as needed.
5. Monitoring: Monitor your usage to ensure you don't exceed your commitment. Set up alerts, and regularly review your usage to stay on track.
6. Cancellation Policy: Check the terms and conditions of the commitment and be aware of the cancellation policy. Some commitments may be non-cancelable and non-refundable.
7. Alternatives: Before making a CUD commitment, explore other cost optimization options such as sustained use discounts, custom machine types, and custom roles.

Exporting Google Cloud Billing data to BigQuery

If you're using Google Cloud Platform (GCP), you may want to export your billing data to BigQuery for further analysis. In this post, we'll show you how to set up the export and what you can do with the data once it's in BigQuery.

First, you'll need to enable billing export to BigQuery. To do this, go to the "Billing" section of the GCP Console, and click on the "Billing Export" section. From there, you can select the project and dataset you want to export the data to.

When setting up the export, you will have the option to choose between different types of exports: Standard, Detailed, and Pricing. Standard export includes basic information such as project, sku, and cost. Detailed export includes additional information such as resource labels and service details. Pricing export includes detailed pricing information such as SKU unit price and usage amount.

Once the export is set up, billing data will be exported to BigQuery every day. You can also use the export to break down costs by labels, which can be useful for tracking costs for different departments or projects.

Once the data is in BigQuery, you can start analyzing it. One popular use case for billing data is to create cost reports. You can use SQL queries to break down costs by project, by label, or by date. You can also use the data to create charts and reports that help you understand where your costs are coming from.

Another use case for billing data is to set up alerts. For example, you can set up an alert to notify you if costs for a particular project or label exceed a certain threshold. You can also set up alerts to notify you if costs are trending in a particular direction.

Overall, exporting billing data to BigQuery is a great way to gain more insight into your GCP costs and usage. With the ability to analyze the data and set up alerts, you can make more informed decisions about your GCP usage and costs.