Pricing for Google Cloud's operations suite

The pricing for Google Cloud's operations suite gives you control over your usage and spending: you pay only for what you use. You can use the free usage allotments to get started with no upfront fees or commitments.

The following tables summarize the pricing information for Cloud Logging, Cloud Monitoring, and Cloud Trace:

Feature Price1 Free allotment per month Effective date
Logging data $0.50/GiB First 50 GiB/project July 1, 2018
Logs data storage is currently free for all retention periods. Effective March 31 2021, data retention will be priced at $0.01/GiB per month above default retention periods.
Feature Price1 Free allotment per month Effective date
Monitoring data $0.2580/MiB: 150–100,000 MiB
$0.1510/MiB: 100,000–250,000 MiB
$0.0610/MiB: >250,000 MiB		 All GCP metrics2
First 150 MiB per billing account for chargeable metrics		 July 1, 2018
Monitoring API calls $0.01/1,000 Read API calls (Write API calls are free) First 1 million Read API calls included per billing account July 1, 2018
FEATURE PRICE FREE ALLOTMENT PER MONTH EFFECTIVE DATE
Trace Ingestion $0.20/million spans First 2.5 million spans November 1, 2018

1 For pricing purposes, all units such as MB and GB represent binary measures. For example, 1 MB is 220 bytes. 1 GB is 230 bytes. These binary units are also known as mebibyte (MiB) and gibibyte (GiB), respectively. Note also that MB and MiB, and GB and GiB, are used interchangeably.

2 There is no charge for Google Cloud metrics or Anthos metrics that are measured at up to 1 data point per minute, the current highest resolution. In the future, metrics measured at higher resolutions might incur a charge.

For detailed information about the costs for Google Cloud's operations suite products, see the following sections of this page:

For information about Anthos pricing, see Anthos.

Viewing your usage

To view your current usage, go to the Cloud Billing Reports page of the Google Cloud Console

Go to Cloud Billing

Based on your current usage data, you can estimate your bills by using the pricing calculator.

For example, consider a configuration where every Compute Engine VM instance generates 10 GiB of chargeable logs and 20 MiB of chargeable metrics per month. By using the pricing calculator you can determine the expected Cloud Monitoring and Cloud Logging costs:

1 VM 10 VMS 100 VMs 1000 VMs
Metrics cost per month $0.00 $12.90 $477.30 $5,121.30
Logging cost per month $0.00 $25.00 $475.00 $4,975.00
Total Cost: $0.00 $37.90 $952.30 $10,096.30

Configuring a billing alert

To be notified if your billable or forecasted charges exceed a budget, create an alert by using the Budgets and alerts page of the Google Cloud Console:

  1. Sign in to the Google Cloud Console:
    Sign in to Cloud Console
  2. Open the console Navigation menu , and then select Billing. If you have more than one Cloud Billing account, then do one of the following:
    • To manage Cloud Billing for the current project, select Go to linked billing account.
    • To locate a different Cloud Billing account, select Manage billing accounts and choose the account for which you'd like to set a budget.
  3. In the Billing navigation menu, select Budgets & alerts.
  4. Click Create budget.
  5. Complete the budget dialog. In this dialog, you select Google Cloud projects and products, and then you create a budget for that combination. By default, you are notified when you reach 50%, 90%, and 100% of the budget. For complete documentation, see Set budgets and budget alerts.

Cloud Logging

Logging charges for the volume of ingested log data that exceeds the free monthly logs allotment. Non-chargeable logs don't count towards the logs allotment limit. This section provides the following information:

  • Defines chargeable and non-chargeable logs.
  • Defines when there might be charges related to log storage.
  • Provides information on how to reduce your log ingestion.
  • Provides settings for an alerting policy that can notify you if your log ingestion reaches a threshold.

For current pricing information, see Cloud Logging Pricing.

For limits that apply to your use of Logging, including data retention periods, see Quotas and limits.

To view your current usage, go to the Cloud Billing Reports page or the Logging Resource Usage page of the Google Cloud Console:

Go to Logging Resource Usage

Based on your current usage data, you can estimate your bills.

Non-chargeable logs

The following logs are free and don't count towards the logs allotment limit:

  • Cloud Audit Logging logs that are enabled by default. This includes all Admin Activity audit logs and System Event audit logs.

  • Access Transparency logs. See the Access Transparency logs documentation for more information.

  • Excluded logs. Logging gives you the ability to manually identify and exclude less important log entries from your project, thus reducing your usage. For more information, see Excluding logs.

  • Anthos logs

  • Dataflow logs

Chargeable logs

All logs except for those logs listed in the section titled Non-chargeable logs, are chargeable and are priced by ingested volume. This includes Data Access audit logs beyond those that are provided by the default configuration. For more information, see Configuring Data Access audit logs.

For a project to ingest more than the monthly free log allotment, that project must have a valid billing account.

Logs storage

For each Google Cloud project, Logging automatically creates two logs buckets for storage: _Required and _Default. When pricing goes into effect, you won't be charged for logs stored in the _Required logs bucket, which contains non-chargeable logs.

You can also create custom logs buckets in any Google Cloud project. If you configure custom retention periods on your custom buckets or the _Default bucket, extending logs data retention longer than the default retention periods, then the storage costs will apply.

Reducing your logs ingestion

You can take advantage of two free services in Logging to reduce your logs usage and preserve log entries that might otherwise be lost:

Logs exclusions let you completely exclude log entries matching a specific filter or sample certain messages so that only a sampled percentage of the messages appear in the Logging Logs Viewer. Excluded log entries don't count against your allotment. You can export your excluded log entries to retain access to them outside of Logging. For instructions on how to exclude logs, see Excluding Logs.

Logs sinks let you export log entries out of Logging before they are discarded because either you have exceeded your logs allotment or you have marked the log entries for exclusion. There is no Logging charge for exporting logs, but the services that receive your exported logs charge you for the usage. For instructions how to export logs, review Exporting Logs.

Alerting on monthly log bytes ingested

To create an alerting policy that triggers when your monthly log bytes ingested exceeds your user-defined limit for Cloud Logging, use the following settings:

Target pane
Field
Value
Resource type Global
Metric Monthly log bytes ingested
Filter
Aggregator sum
Period 60 m
Advanced Aggregation Aligner: max
Configuration pane
Field
Value
Condition triggers if Any time series violates
Condition is above
Threshold You determine the acceptable value.
For Minimum acceptable value is 30 minutes.

Cloud Monitoring

Monitoring charges for the volume of ingested metric data that exceeds the free monthly metric allotment and for Cloud Monitoring API read calls that exceed the free monthly API allotment. Non-chargeable metrics and Cloud Monitoring API write calls don't count towards an allotment limit. This section provides the following information:

  • Defines chargeable and non-chargeable metrics
  • Provides a pricing example

For the current pricing information, see Cloud Monitoring Pricing.

For limits that apply to your use of Monitoring, see Quotas and limits.

To view your current usage, go to the Cloud Billing Reports page or the Monitoring Settings page of the Google Cloud Console.

Go to Monitoring Settings

Based on your current usage data, you can estimate your bills.

Non-chargeable metrics

Metric data from Google Cloud, Anthos, and Knative isn't chargeable. Non-chargeable (free) metrics include the following:

Chargeable metrics

All metric data except for those metrics listed in the section titled Non-chargeable metrics, are chargeable and are priced by ingested volume. Chargeable metrics include the following:

When metric data is chargeable, the number and type of data points in your time series contribute to your ingested volume. The values for the metric labels that are part of your time series don't contribute to your ingested volume. The ingestion volume for a scalar data type is 8 bytes and for a distribution data type is 80 bytes.

Alerting on metrics ingested

It isn't possible to create an alert based on the monthly metrics ingested. However, you can create an alert for your Cloud Monitoring costs. For information, see Configuring a billing alert.

Pricing examples

The following examples illustrate how to get an estimate of costs for collecting metric data. These are intended to illustrate the new metrics pricing; for comprehensive estimates, use of the Pricing Calculator. If you access this tool, go to use the Google Cloud's operations suite product to enter you metric, logging, and trace data.

The basic scenario is this: You have some number of monitored resources, such as Compute Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, or App Engine, that are writing data from some number of metrics each month.

The variables across the scenarios include:

  • The number of resources.
  • The number of metrics.
  • Whether the metrics are Google Cloud metrics or not.
  • The rate at which the metric data is written.

The examples in this section are for Monitoring pricing as of July 2020.

Common background

In the following pricing examples, each metric data point ingested is assumed to be of type double, int64, or bool; these count as 8 bytes for pricing purposes. There are roughly 730 hours (365 days / 12 months * 24 hours) in a month, or 43,800 minutes.

For one metric writing data at the rate of 1 data point/minute for one month:

  • Total data points is: 43,800
  • Total volume ingested is:
    • 350,400 bytes (43,800 data points * 8 bytes)
    • 0.33416748 MiB (350,400 bytes / 1,048,576 bytes/MiB)

For one metric writing data at the rate of 1 data point/hour for one month:

  • Total data points is: 730
  • Total volume ingested:
    • 5,840 bytes (730 data points * 8 bytes)
    • 0.005569458 MiB (5,840 bytes / 1,048,576 bytes/MiB)

Examples

Scenario 1: You have 1,000 resources, each writing 75 metrics. These are Google Cloud metrics only, writing at the rate of 1 data point/minute.

  • Monthly ingestion: 25,063 MiB: 0.33416748 MiB for one metric * 75,000 (that is, 1,000 resources, 75 metrics)
  • Approximate cost per month: $0.00 (Google Cloud metrics are included free)
MiB ingested Rate ($/MiB) Cost ($)
unlimited 0.00 $0.00
Total 25,063 $0.00

Scenario 2: You have 1,000 resources, each writing 75 custom metrics. These are chargeable metrics writing at the rate of 1 data point/minute.

  • Monthly ingestion: 25,063 MiB (same as above)
  • Approximate cost per month: $6,427.55
MiB ingested Rate ($/MiB) Cost ($)
150 0.00 $0.00
24,913 0.258 $6,427.55
Total 25,063 $6,427.55

Scenario 3: You have 1,000 resources, each writing 75 custom metrics. These are chargeable metrics writing at the rate of 1 data point/hour.

  • Monthly ingestion: 418 MiB = 0.005569458 MiB for one metric * 75,000
  • Approximate cost per month: $69.14
MiB ingested Rate ($/MiB) Cost ($)
150 0.00 $0.00
267 0.258 $69.14
Total 417 $69.14

Scenario 4: You have 1 resource writing 500,000 metrics. These are chargeable metrics writing each at the rate of 1 data point/minute.

  • Monthly ingestion: 167,084 MiB: 0.33416748 MiB for one metric * 500,000
  • Approximate cost per month: $35,890.98
MiB ingested Rate ($/MiB) Cost ($)
150 0.00 $0.00
99,850 0.258 $25,761.30
67,084 0.151 $10,129.68
Total 167,084 $35,890.98

Error Reporting

For the current pricing information, see Error Reporting Pricing.

For limits that apply to your use of Error Reporting, see Quotas and limits.

Cloud Debugger

For the current pricing information, see Cloud Debugger Pricing.

Cloud Profiler

For the current pricing information, see Cloud Profiler Pricing.

For limits that apply to your use of Profiler, see Quotas and limits.

Cloud Trace

Trace charges are based on the number of trace spans ingested and scanned. When latency data is sent to Trace, it's packaged as a trace that is composed of spans, and the spans are ingested by the Cloud Trace backend. When you view trace data, the stored spans are scanned by Cloud Trace. This section provides the following information:

  • Defines chargeable and non-chargeable trace spans
  • Provides a pricing example
  • Provides information on how to reduce your trace span ingestion.
  • Provides settings for an alerting policy that can notify you if your trace span ingestion reaches a threshold.

For the current pricing information, see Cloud Trace Pricing.

For limits that apply to your use of Trace, see Quotas and limits.

To view your current usage, go to the Cloud Billing Reports page or the Trace Overview page of the Google Cloud Console:

Go to Trace Overview

Based on your current usage data, you can estimate your bills.

Non-chargeable trace spans

Cloud Trace pricing doesn't apply to spans auto-generated by App Engine Standard, Cloud Functions or Cloud Run: ingestion of these traces are non-chargeable.

Chargeable trace spans

Ingestion of trace spans except for those spans listed in the section titled Non-chargeable traces, are chargeable and are priced by ingested volume. This includes spans created by instrumentation you add to your App Engine Standard application.

Pricing examples

The example is for Trace pricing as of July 2020.

  • If you ingest 2 million spans in a month, your cost is $0. (Your first 2.5 million spans ingested in a month are free.)
  • If you ingest 14 million spans in a month, your cost is $2.30. (Your first 2.5 million spans in a month are free. The remaining spans' cost is calculated as 11.5 million spans * $0.20/million spans = $2.30.)
  • If you ingest 1 billion spans in a month, your cost is $199. (Your first 2.5 million spans in a month are free. The remaining spans' cost is calculated as 997.5 million spans * $0.20/million spans = $199.50.)

Reducing your trace usage

To control Trace span ingestion volume, you can manage your trace sampling rate to balance how many traces you need for performance analysis with your cost tolerance.

For high-traffic systems, most customers can sample at 1 in 1,000 transactions, or even 1 in 10,000 transactions, and still have enough information for performance analysis.

Sampling rate is configured with the Cloud Trace client libraries.

Alerting on monthly spans ingested

To create an alerting policy that triggers when your monthly Cloud Trace spans ingested exceeds a user-defined limit, use the following settings:

Target pane
Field
Value
Resource type global
Metric Monthly trace spans ingested
Filter
Aggregator sum
Period 60 m
Advanced Aggregation Aligner: max
Configuration pane
Field
Value
Condition triggers if Any time series violates
Condition is above
Threshold You determine the acceptable value.
For Minimum acceptable value is 30 minutes.

Anthos

There is no charge for Anthos system logs and metrics.

In a Anthos clusters on VMware cluster, Anthos system logs and metrics include the following:

  • Logs and metrics from all components in an admin cluster
  • Logs and metrics from components in these namespaces in a user cluster: kube-system, gke-system, gke-connect, knative-serving, istio-system, monitoring-system, config-management-system, gatekeeper-system, cnrm-system

Frequently asked questions

How much will I have to pay?

To estimate your usage costs, see Estimating your bills.

To get help with billing questions, see Billing questions.

How do I understand the details of my usage?

Several metrics let you drill into and understand your logs and metrics volume using Metrics Explorer. see View detailed usage in Metrics Explorer for details.

If you’re interested in an even deeper analysis of your logs usage, you can analyze your log volume using logs-based metrics in Datalab. Read this Google Cloud blog post for more information.

How do Workspaces affect billing?

For the most part, Workspaces don't affect billing. Logs and metrics are charged at the Google Cloud project that receives the data, whether or not there is an associated Workspace.

In the case of monitoring AWS accounts, you must use a Workspace to get an AWS connector project for the AWS account. The connector project holds the logs and monitoring data for the AWS account.

What happens if I go over the free allotments?

You are automatically billed for any usage over your free allotments. You don't lose any logs or metrics. To better understand your potential costs, review Estimating your bills.

You can create an alerting policy that monitors your usage and notifies you when you approach the threshold for billing.

I have a large number of Google Cloud logs in my project(s) that I do not use. I am concerned about charges for these logs. How do I avoid this?

You can exclude logs to control which logs are ingested into Logging. See Reducing your logs usage for details.

Will services that send logs to my project receive an error if logs are excluded?

No. Services that send log entries cannot determine whether the log entries are ingested into Logging or not.

Will I be charged twice for Virtual Private Cloud flow logs?

If you send your VPC flow logs to Logging, VPC flow logs generation charges are waived, and only Logging charges apply. However, if you send them and then exclude your VPC flow logs from Logging, VPC flow logs charges apply. For more information, see Google Cloud Pricing Calculator for Networking.