Monitor cloud costs and create budgets at scale

Monitoring and controlling costs effectively is important, especially as you scale your business in the cloud. As the number of teams, applications, and environments running in your cloud deployment expands, it becomes crucial that you provide granular transparency, accountability, and controls to various parts of your organization that incur cloud costs. 

When you’re using Google Cloud, our budgets and alerts features are a powerful part of your cost monitoring toolkit, letting you set your target spending and notify key stakeholders if you’re getting off track. We’re dedicated to making it even easier for you to monitor and control your costs at scale so that you can achieve greater predictability, and we’ve recently released several enhancements that help you do just that.

With the beta release of the Budget API, you can view, create, and manage budgets programmatically at scale. This is especially important if you’re creating a large number of budgets across your organization. For example, you can integrate the Budget API into your deployment manager, like Terraform, to programmatically create a budget for each new project as it’s created in your organization.

We have also added more granular budget filters to make it easier for you to monitor specific slices of your costs across groups of projects and services. For example, an analytics manager can now create a budget to monitor BigQuery spending for the three projects her team uses for business intelligence and building predictive models, as shown here:

Once you’ve created a budget, you can also set up cost forecast alerts to proactively receive notifications when you’re projected to exceed your budget for the month and may need to take action. For example, if you set a cost forecast alert threshold to 120% of your monthly budget, then you will receive notifications when you are expected to exceed your budget by more than 20%, like this:

How customers are monitoring costs at scale 
Customers are already seeing the benefits of these new features, like global water, waste, and energy company Veolia. “At Veolia, we automatically create budgets for new projects using the Google Cloud Budget API as a step in our cloud provisioning workflow in ServiceNow.” says Antoine Castex, product manager at Veolia. “By creating a budget for each project, we are able to closely monitor our costs and take action when needed to prevent budget overruns. This empowers application developers at Veolia focus on what they do best—build amazing products that help make the world more sustainable.” 

Get started with new cost management features
With the new Budget API, granular budget filters, and cost forecast alerts, you can proactively monitor costs across your cloud environment, however you organize your business. Get started by visiting the Budgets and Alerts page in the Cloud Console or by trying out the new Budget API. See the Budget API user guide for more details.

To learn more about budget alerts and Google Cloud cost management tools, check out the following resources:

• Documentation: Budget API

• Documentation: Set budget alerts

• Hands-on training: Understanding your GCP costs

• Hands-on training: Optimizing your GCP costs 

• What’s new: Billing release notes