MARK MIRCHANDANI: Most people who
are familiar with paying for things probably know
what an invoice looks like.
But you may also be aware of how challenging deciphering a Cloud
invoice can be, potentially with thousands of lines
of cryptic acronyms and text.
On this episode and "Beyond Your Bill,"
we'll walk you through how to explore your costs using
Google Cloud Billing Reports.
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MARK MIRCHANDANI: Our last videos
covered how resources in your GCP account can be organized
and how to manage permissions with a billing account.
In this video, we'll look at how you
can explore the costs associated with a billing account
by viewing billing reports in the Google Cloud console.
We'll focus on answering some common questions
like how much am I spending, what are my cost trends,
and what are my cost drivers?
I'll use a sample billing account for this video,
but you can go to the Cloud console
and use the left hand navigation to click on Billing and then
Reports to view billing reports for your own billing accounts
and projects.
The report defaults to the current calendar month
and shows you a lot of information right off the bat.
In the top left, you can see the cost
to date for the current month and how
that compares to the cost for the same time
period in the previous month.
In the top right, you can see the forecasted cost
for the current month and how that
compares to the cost from the previous month.
Right in the middle, there's a chart that
shows cost group by project.
Each color shows a different project,
and you can hover over the chart to see more specific details.
There's also a dotted cost trend line
that forecasts what you're spending
might look like in the future based on historical trends.
Under the chart, you'll see a list
of projects and a table view.
In addition, there are filters on the right side
to drill down and further analyze your costs.
You can customize the time range you're currently
viewing so you can explore previous months,
the past quarter, or any other window of time.
In addition, you can toggle the invoice month
to line up the report directly to your invoice.
When looking at your costs by invoice,
you'll be able to filter out specific charges such as taxes.
This is the best way to get an exact visual representation
of the invoices sent to your company
and to explore the costs associated with each project
or service.
You can also choose from other filters
to see how your costs are trending.
As you change the time range, the costs
and comparative costs above the graph
will update based on your view.
You're also able to filter costs by location,
selecting a geography, region, or multi-region area.
This is especially handy to see a cost breakdown by region,
such as comparing your costs between the Americas and EMEA.
Click a location to include it in your filtered view
and deselect all the locations to go back to the default view.
There is also the ability to selectively filter out
credits, which can be made up of different discounts
based on your usage, such as sustained use discounts
and committed use discounts.
For example, if you have a lot of consistent compute engine
usage, you may see a big impact from sustained use discounts.
Sometimes you need to drill in to see what's
driving a spike in your cost.
In this particular billing account,
we can see that some pretty big spikes have occurred recently.
By hovering over the chart, it looks like one specific project
is responsible.
The next step is to drill in further
to understand what caused it.
We'll filter to just the specific project responsible
and then group byproduct to see more information.
Having a consistent and clear naming convention
comes in handy here so that you can track down
the right information about the project usage.
For our example, it looks like a rise in BigQuery usage
is responsible for the spike, but we can see even more detail
if we filter by SKU.
This reveals that BigQuery analysis
is what's causing the increase, which is the SKU for running
queries in BigQuery.
With the GCB project and specific cause outlined,
it should be a lot easier to narrow down
what action or application is driving the cost.
So the billing reports let you see your costs
and drill down into specific areas
to monitor and investigate unexpected changes in cost.
If you're just looking for a high level
summary of your costs, try the cost breakdown report,
which you can also access from the left hand menu
from a billing account.
This report lets you see how discounts and taxes combined
with your usage costs to arrive at your final invoice amount
every month.
Using these different reports can
show you a clear picture of your costs for different scenarios.
Using the billing reports available to you
directly within the console, you can
see what you're currently spending,
visualize the amount your forecasted to spend,
and understand your cost drivers.
In the next video, we'll look at how
to export your billing data for further analysis
and create custom dashboards.
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