Estimating your bills

The information on this page applies to the current pricing for Google Cloud's operations suite.

Overview

Based on your usage data, you can estimate your bills for using Google Cloud's operations suite.

The Cloud Billing Reports page, as well as the Logging, Monitoring, and Trace consoles, show you your current usage data. In addition, the Logging and Monitoring consoles display your projected usage data for the current month.

This page details how to access your usage data, depending on the aggregation that you prefer:

• Usage by billing account
• Detailed ingestion data in Metrics Explorer
• Logging usage by project
• Logging usage by resource type
• Logs-based metrics usage
• Monitoring usage by metrics scope

Review usage data to estimate your bill

Once you have the usage data you want, as described on this page, you can estimate your future bill in two ways:

• Refer to the pricing information: Compare your current usage data with the prices found in this table to get a reasonable approximation of your future bills for Google Cloud's operations suite.

• Use the pricing calculator:

  1. Select the Google Cloud's operations suite product.
  2. Add your current or projected Monitoring usage data to the Metrics section and click Add to estimate.
  3. Add your current or projected Logging usage data to the Logs section and click Add to estimate.
  4. Add your current Trace usage data to the Trace spans section and click Add to estimate.

  5. Once you have input your usage data, click Estimate.

     Estimates of your future bills for using Google Cloud's operations suite appear. You can also Email Estimate or Save Estimate.

Note: Any estimated fees are approximations and for discussion purposes only.

View usage by billing account

1. From anywhere in the Google Cloud console, click Navigation menu and select Billing.
2. If you have more than one billing account, select Go to linked billing account to view the current project's billing account. To locate a different billing account, select Manage billing accounts and choose the account for which you'd like to get usage reports.
3. Select Reports.
4. Select Group By > SKU. This menu might be hidden; you can access it by clicking Show Filters.

5. From the SKUs drop-down list, make the following selections:

   1. Log Volume (Cloud Logging usage)
   2. Spans Ingested (Cloud Trace usage)
   3. Metric Volume and Monitoring API Requests (Cloud Monitoring usage)

   You can also select just one or some of these SKUs if you don't want to group your usage data.

   Note: If your usage of any of these SKUs is 0, they don't appear in the Group By > SKU pull-down menu. For example, customers who use only the Cloud console might never generate API requests, so Monitoring API Requests doesn't appear in the list.

6. Your usage data, filtered by the SKUs you selected, appears:

   

View ingestion data in Metrics Explorer

You can use Metrics Explorer to see the ingestion data used for billing.

Note: Cloud Logging charges for both of the following:

• Ingestion: the volume of logs ingested into Cloud Logging.
• Storage: the volume of logs ingested into certain log buckets and stored for longer than a free retention period.

The metrics described in this section are for ingestion only.

For information about how Cloud Logging charges for ingestion and storage, see Pricing. For information about estimating Logging storage costs, see View Logging by Cloud project and View Logging by resource type.

To use Metrics Explorer to view the metrics for a monitored resource, follow these steps:

1. In the Google Cloud console, go to the Metrics Explorer page within Monitoring.

Go to Metrics Explorer

2. Select the Configuration tab.
3. Expand the Select a metric menu, enter Global in the filter bar, and then use the submenus to select a specific resource type and metric:
   1. In the Active resources menu, select Global.
   2. In the Active metric categories menu, select Billing.
   3. In the Active metrics menu, select a billing metric^†.

      • Log bytes ingested: Log bytes ingested for a project in Logging.

        Be careful to not select Log bytes, which is not a billing metric. This metric computes ingestion differently from the billing metric.

      • Log bucket bytes ingested: Bytes ingested into individual log buckets in Logging.
      • Monthly log bytes ingested: Each point represents the month-to-date sum of log bytes ingested in Logging for your project. The monthly total is available on the last day of the month, when it also resets.
      • Log bucket monthly bytes ingested: Each point represents the month-to-date sum of log bytes ingested into individual log buckets in Logging. The monthly total is available on the last day of the month, when it also resets.
      • Metric bytes ingested: Chargeable number of bytes of metric data ingested in Monitoring.
      • Metric samples ingested: Chargeable number of samples of metric data ingested in Monitoring. For more information about features that charge by samples, see Metrics charged by samples ingested.
      • Trace spans ingested: Chargeable trace spans ingested in Trace.
      • Monthly trace spans ingested: Each point represents the month-to-date sum of trace spans ingested in Trace. It resets on the last day of the month; the monthly total is found on the last day of the month.

      ^† Billing metrics have billing in their names, for example, logging.googleapis.com/billing/log_bytes_ingested.

   4. Click Apply.
4. Optional: To configure how the data is viewed, add filters and use the Group By, Aggregator, and chart-type menus. For example, you can group by resource or metric labels. For more information, see Select metrics when using Metrics Explorer.
5. Optional: Change the graph settings:
   • For quota and other metrics that report one sample per day, set the time frame to at least one week and set the plot type to Stacked bar chart.
   • For distribution valued metrics, set the plot type to Heatmap chart.

Your usage data appears, filtered by the metrics you selected. If metrics usage data doesn't appear in the chart, then you might need to zoom out to 1w or 1m in the time range selector above the chart.

Key Points:

• To identify the metric or resource type with the highest usage, use Outlier mode in Metrics Explorer.
• For information about managing costs of user-defined metrics, see View metric diagnostics.

View Logging usage by Cloud project

1. Go to the Logs Storage page in Logging:

   Go to Logs Storage

2. The Logs Storage page displays a summary of your logging ingestion data for the selected Cloud project. This data includes the current calendar month's to-date usage, the previous calendar month's total usage, and the projected total usage for the current calendar month.

Optional: To review your project-level billing data in detail, click See bill under Previous month volume. This takes you to the Cloud Billing Reports page.

View Logging usage by resource type

1. Go to the Logs Storage page in Logging:

   Go to Logs Storage

   The Logs Storage page displays a summary of your logging ingestion data for the selected Cloud project. The Logs Storage page displays a summary of your logging ingestion data for the selected Cloud project. This data includes the current calendar month's to-date usage, the previous calendar month's total usage, and the projected total usage for the current calendar month.

2. Under Current total volume in the summary, click See total usage by resource type.

3. Your usage data appears in Metrics Explorer, grouped by resource_type.

You can further modify how the data is displayed, using the Filter, Group By, and Aggregator menus. For more details, see View ingestion data in Metrics Explorer above.

View logs-based metrics usage

1. Go to Logging:

   Go to Logging

2. Select Logs-based metrics.

3. In the User-defined Metrics table, your usage data appears:

   • Previous Month Usage represents the sum of bytes ingested in the logs-based metric in the previous calendar month.
   • Usage (MTD) represents the sum of bytes ingested in the logs-based metric in the current calendar month.

Optional: Clicking any of the column names lets you sort data in ascending or descending order. This is helpful, for example, if you want to review which metrics ingest the most data.

View Monitoring usage by metrics scope

A metrics scope is used in Cloud Monitoring to let you view metrics that are stored in multiple Google Cloud projects or AWS accounts. When you configure a metrics scope, you don't affect which project receives metric data or cause data to be duplicated.

For example, suppose Project-A contains 60 VMs and Project-B contains 40 VMs. If you create a metrics scope that includes Project-A and Project-B, then you can view the combined metrics for the 100 VMs. You can now view just the metrics for Project-A, just the metrics of Project-B, or the combination of metrics from both projects. Even though you have two ways to view the metrics of Project-A, there aren't billing implications.

To view your Monitoring usage by metrics scope, do the following:

1. Go to Monitoring:

   Go to Monitoring

2. If the Monitoring navigation pane, select Settings and then select the Summary tab.

   The Metrics Ingested table displays a summary of your metrics ingestion data by resource. This data includes the previous month's total usage, the current month's to-date usage, and projected usage for the current month.

3. Optional: To get your project-level usage in detail, click View Bill in the Metrics Ingested table. This takes you to the Cloud Billing Reports page.