About cost and utilization data

This document provides information about the source of cost and optimization data in the Cost Explorer, how the data is categorized, and limitations on data availability.

Cost data

  • Source: Cost data is based on the same information that powers your Cloud Billing reports and exports.
  • Latency: Google Cloud products report usage and cost data to Cloud Billing processes at varying intervals. You might see a delay between your use of Google Cloud services and when the usage and costs are available to the Cost Explorer. Typically, costs are available within a day, but this can sometimes take more than 24 hours.
  • Gross costs: The costs shown are generally gross costs, reflecting usage at your contract prices before any credits, such as Committed Use Discounts, sustained use discounts, or promotional credits, are applied.
  • Currency: When scoping by an App Hub application, all underlying resources within that application must use the same currency for costs to be aggregated. If resources are linked to billing accounts with different currencies, cost data for that application might be incomplete.

Utilization data

  • Source: Utilization metrics are sourced from Cloud Monitoring.
  • Availability: Availability depends on the resource type and whether the appropriate agents (like the Ops Agent) are configured to collect detailed metrics.

Product categories

The product names used in the Cost Explorer are designed to be logical and user-friendly. These might group costs differently than the service categories used within Cloud Billing reports. For example, costs that the Cost Explorer attributes to "Compute Engine" might encompass multiple underlying services from a Cloud Billing perspective.

Costs for products that the Cost Explorer doesn't support are reported under the product category Other.

Resource-level costs

This section lists supported products with resource-level cost data.

App Hub doesn't support all resources that the Cost Explorer supports, and there are some limitations for reported costs. For details, see Application costs.

(Preview) Data transfer costs are reported separately under Networking costs for some resources as indicated in the table of supported resources.
Product name Supported resources Additional information
AlloyDB for PostgreSQL Backup
Cluster
Instance
App Engine Service Data transfer costs are reported separately as networking costs.
Bigtable App Profile
Instance

For instances: Data transfer costs are reported separately as networking costs.
Cloud Deploy Delivery pipeline
Cloud Run Job
Service
  • Utilization data for Cloud Run is available for the 6-week period before the current date.
  • Data transfer costs are reported separately as networking costs.
Cloud Run functions Function

Data transfer costs are reported separately as networking costs.
Compute Engine Allocation
Address
Disk
Forwarding rule
Global address
Image
Instance
Instant snapshot
Machine image
Managed instance group (MIG)
Network attachment
Reservation
Snapshot
Storage pool
Target VPN gateway
VPN gateway
VPN tunnel
  • Local storage costs are reported under the product Persistent Disk.
  • For instances and MIGs: Data transfer costs are reported separately as networking costs.
Google Kubernetes Engine Cluster
  • Resource cost includes Compute Engine VMs (vCPU, RAM, GPU) and the GKE cluster management fee.
  • Data transfer costs are reported separately as networking costs.
  • Local storage costs are reported under the product Persistent Disk.
Dataflow Job
Snapshot
Cloud Data Fusion Instance
Dataproc Metastore Service
Firestore Database

Data transfer costs are reported separately as networking costs.

Cloud Interconnect (Preview)

VLAN attachment

The resource cost includes the hourly cost of the VLAN attachment. Data transfer costs for the VLAN attachment are reported separately as networking costs. Data transfer costs are not attributed to the resources that use the VLAN attachment.
Backup for GKE Backup plan

Cloud Load Balancing (Preview)

Forwarding rule
URL map

 Data transfer and processing costs are not attributed to the resources that use the forwarding rule or URL map.
  • For forwarding rules, the cost includes the hourly cost of the forwarding rule plus any hourly charges for proxy instances.
  • For URL maps, the cost includes the hourly cost of all forwarding rules grouped under the URL map.

Data transfer and data processing costs for a forwarding rule or URL map are reported separately as networking costs.
Cloud Logging Log bucket
Managed Service for Microsoft Active Directory Domain
Memorystore for Redis Instance
Secret Manager Secret
Spanner Instance
Database
Cloud SQL Admin API Instance
Cloud Storage Bucket

Data transfer costs are reported separately as networking costs.

Application costs

For an App Hub application, the total cost includes all resources that are fully used by the application.

The following limitations apply to application costs:

  • This total application cost doesn't include costs for resources that are shared across applications such as VLAN attachments.
  • Application cost only includes costs for resources that are supported by App Hub and supported by the Cost Explorer.
  • The cost for an application is only available if all application resources are linked to billing accounts in the same currency.
  • You can't filter resources by location.

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