In today's cloud-based world, it is more important than ever to be able to visualize your costs.
Google Cloud Platform (GCP) offers a variety of cost tools to help you track and manage your cloud costs. These tools can help you:
- Understand your current spending
- Identify areas where you can reduce costs
- Set budgets and receive alerts when you're approaching your limits
Budget Tool
The Budget Tool is a simple way to track your spending and set alerts. You can create budgets for individual projects, services, or resources. When your spending reaches or exceeds a budget, you'll receive an email notification.
Quotes
The Quotes Tool is designed to prevent the over-consumption of resources because of an error or a malicious attack.
The Quotes Tool allows you to request quotes for your upcoming GCP spending. This can help you to plan your budget and avoid unexpected costs and reconsider your increase needs.
Reports Tool
The Reports Tool provides a more comprehensive and quick view of your spending. You can generate reports on your costs by project, service, resource, time period and more….
Export to BigQuery
If you need to analyze your cost data in more detail, you can export it to BigQuery. BigQuery is a serverless, highly scalable, and cost-effective cloud data warehouse (and data processing). You can use BigQuery to run ad hoc queries.
With a few simple steps, you can easily connect your billing information to the Big Query dataset :
Ad hoc queries:
Now, in case you would like to use custom and complex queries but also have interactive rich visualization, schedule reports, and share insights with others, you can consider using Looker Studio and BigQuery as data source.
Looker
Looker is a business intelligence (BI) platform that allows you to create custom reports and dashboards from your GCP data. Looker can be used to visualize your data in a variety of ways and to share your insights with others.
Looker Studio
One of the best ways to visualize your costs is to use Looker Studio. Looker Studio is a free powerful data visualization tool that can be used to create interactive dashboards and reports.
To get started with cost visualization in Looker Studio, you will need to create a new dashboard. In the dashboard, you will need to add a data source. In our case is BigQuery (and the billing export dataset).
Once you have added a data source, you can start to create visualizations. There are many different types of visualizations that you can create, such as charts, tables, and maps.
Instead of creating many charts, views and dashboards from zero for cost visualization, Google created us cost visualization template called Billboard.
Billboard
The billboard template consists of a bar chart that shows your total costs, and a line chart that shows your costs over time. The billboard template also includes a table that shows your costs by project, service, region, labels, trends and more.
The billboard template will be populated with your cost data. You can then edit the visualization to customize it to your needs.
- It's free. There is no cost to use the GCP billboard tool.
- It's easy to use and has an interactive UI. It is designed to be easy to use, even for users with no prior experience with Looker.
- It's customizable. You can customize the billboard tool to show the information that you need.
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