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Google Cloud currently allow you to programmatically inspect your costs by exporting your project’s billing information to a dedicated dataset configured in your project’s BigQuery database.

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Create a new dataset on BigQuery

Follow these steps provided by GCP official documentation to create a new dataset.

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Export Billing Data into BigQuery

Follow these steps provided by GCP official documentation to export your billing information into an existing dataset in your BigQuery database. The exported billing information covers all your GCP projects that are under the same GCP billing account. After the export has been configured, GCP will automatically create a new table in the provided dataset. The new table name should be like gcp_billing_export_v1_011D4F_BEC512_83EA95 (for e.g).

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Create GCP Service Account key

Follow these steps provided by GCP official documentation to export new keys for your service account. This service account should have the following permissions:
  1. bigquery.jobs.create
  2. bigquery.tables.getData
You can either create a custom role that includes these permissions (the preferred, more secured approach) and attach it to the service account, or you can attach the following GCP predefined roles to the service account:
  1. BigQuery Job User
  2. BigQuery Data Viewer
After the credentials have been created, download them as a JSON file. If you wish to create the service account key via Terraform then our predefined template could be helpful.

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Add Credentials to your Organization

  1. Under your Organization Settings, Select the Credentials tab
  2. Click Add Credential
  3. Select the GCP Credentials type.
  4. Enter the BigQuery Table ID that you’ve created in the previous step.
    Table ID should look like <PROJECT_ID>.<DATASET_NAME>.<TABLE_NAME> where:
  • PROJECT_ID - the GCP project name.
  • DATASET_NAME - the dataset name that you’ve created in the previous step.
  • TABLE_NAME - the table name that you’ve created in the previous step.
  1. Enter the Service Account Key JSON that you’ve created and downloaded in the previous step.
  2. Click Add

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Enable cost monitoring

  1. Go to the Project Settings of the desired project.
  2. Select the Credentials tab.
  3. Check the appropriate cloud provider checkbox, and select the credential you created in the steps above.
  4. Click Save.
Data visibilityPlease note that after the configuration of cost monitoring is complete, a redeploy to the environments is needed, and once redeployed it can take 24-48 hours for data to show, depending on the cloud provider’s cost exploration capabilities.

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Next steps