Cloud Billing interactive tutorials

Learn more about Cloud Billing and get hands-on with interactive tutorials available in the Google Cloud console.


Take a tour of Cloud Billing (10 minutes)

Example billing account overview page.

In this tutorial, you will walk through the basics of how to understand and manage your costs using the Google Cloud console.

Launch the billing tour


Understand billing reports (30 minutes)

Example billing reports page.

Learn how to answer cost management questions using intuitive reports available in the Google Cloud console. In this tutorial, you'll familiarize yourself with some of the built-in reports and learn how to customize them to answer questions such as:

  • How much am I spending?
  • What are my cost trends?
  • What are my cost drivers?
  • What is the breakdown of my spend by product?

Launch the billing reports tutorial


Manage payment methods and settings (5 minutes)

Example payment method overview page.

A Cloud Billing account is connected to a Google payments profile. The Google payments profile is a Google-level resource that pays for the charges you incur in the linked Cloud Billing account. In this tutorial, you will walk through the basics of Google payments, including the payment methods for your Google Cloud account and how to manage and update your payments profile.

Launch the payment methods tutorial


Create a Google Cloud budget (10 minutes)

Example budget creation page.

Budgets are the first and simplest way to get a handle on your costs. They are a tool to track your actual spend against your planned spend. Budgets send notifications to provide visibility into the costs accruing in your projects. In the tutorials, you'll create a basic budget and get an introduction to the different options available to configure your budget.

Choose the tutorial that matches your level of access to Cloud Billing accounts or projects.

For billing account users: Launch the create budgets tutorial

For project users: Launch the create budgets tutorial


Automate responses to Cloud Billing budget notifications (30 minutes)

Viewing the output of Pub/Sub topics in the
  Cloud Functions logs page.

Budgets are a tool you can use to track your actual spend against your planned spend. Importantly, budgets do not enable or prevent spending but rather send notifications to provide visibility into the costs accruing in your projects. You can configure budgets to send programmatic notifications which you can use to program automated cost control responses to your spend.

In this tutorial, you'll learn how to set up a basic cost control response using programmatic budget notifications. After you've completed this tutorial, you can modify the cost control response based on your needs.

Launch the automate responses tutorial


Analyze billing data with BigQuery (20 minutes)

Example BigQuery query page.

Cloud Billing export to BigQuery enables you to export detailed Google Cloud billing data (such as usage, cost estimates, and pricing data) automatically throughout the day to a BigQuery dataset that you specify. In this tutorial, you will:

  • Create a "Billing Administration" project to hold all exported billing data.
  • Create a BigQuery dataset to hold all exported billing data from all projects linked to the same Cloud Billing account.
  • In Cloud Billing, enable billing data to export to that BigQuery dataset.
  • Run some sample queries through the BigQuery web interface to examine billing data.

Launch the billing data export tutorial