Most people who are familiar with paying for things probably know what an invoice looks like, but you may also be aware of how challenging deciphering a Cloud invoice can be, potentially with thousands of lines of cryptic acronyms and text. On this episode of Beyond Your Bill, we'll walk you through how to explore your costs using Google Cloud Billing Reports. Our last videos covered how resources in your GCP account can be organized and how to manage permissions with a billing account. In this video, we'll look at how you can explore the costs associated with a billing account by viewing Billing Reports in the Google Cloud Console. We'll focus on answering some common questions like, how much I'm I spending? What are my cost trends, and what are my cost drivers? I'll use a sample billing account for this video, but you can go to the Cloud Console and use the left-hand navigation to click on "Billing" and then "Reports" to view billing reports for your own billing accounts and projects. The report defaults to the current calendar month and shows you a lot of information right off the bat. In the top left, you can see the cost to date for the current month and how that compares to the cost for the same time period in the previous month. In the top right, you can see the forecasted cost for the current month and how that compares to the cost from the previous month. Right in the middle, there's a chart that shows cost group by project. Each color shows a different project and you can hover over the chart to see more specific details. There's also a dotted cost trendline, that forecasts what you're spending might look like in the future based on historical trends. Under the chart, you'll see a list of projects in a TableView. In addition, there are filters on the right side to drill down and further analyze your costs. You can customize the time range you're currently viewing. You could explore previous months, the past quarter, or any other window of time. In addition, you can talk with the invoice month to line up the report directly to your invoice. When looking at your costs by invoice, you'll be able to filter out specific charges such as taxes. This is the best way to get an exact visual representation of the invoices sent to your company and to explore the costs associated with each project or service. You can also choose from other filters to see how your costs are trending. As you change the time range, the cost and comparative costs above the graph will update based on your view. You're also able to filter cost by location, selecting a geography, region, or multi-region area. This is especially handy to see a cost breakdown by region, such as comparing your costs between the Americas and EMEA. Click a location and include it in your filter view and de-select all the locations to go back to the default view. There's also the ability to selectively filter out credits, which can be made up of different discounts based on your usage, such as sustained use discounts and committed use discounts. For example, if you have a lot of consistent compute engine usage, you may see a big impact from sustained use discounts. Sometimes you need to drill in to see what's driving a spike in your cost. In this particular billing account, we can see that some pretty big spikes have occurred recently. By hovering over the chart, it looks like one specific project is responsible. The next step is to drill in further to understand what caused it. We'll filter to just the specific project responsible and then group by product to see more information. Having a consistent and clear naming convention comes in handy here, so that you can track down the right information about the project usage. For our example, it looks like a rise in BigQuery usage is responsible for the spike. But we can see even more detail if we filter by skew. This reveals that BigQuery analysis is what's causing the increase, which is the skew for running queries in BigQuery. With a GCP project and specific cause outlined, it should be a lot easier to narrow down what action or application is driving the cost. The billing reports let you see your costs and drill down into specific areas to monitor and investigate unexpected changes in cost. If you're just looking for a high-level summary of your costs, try the cost breakdown report, which you can also access from the left-hand menu from a billing account. This report lets you see how discounts and taxes combine with your usage costs to arrive at your final invoice amount every month. Using these different reports can show you a clear picture of your costs for different scenarios. Using the billing reports available to you directly within the console, you can see what you're currently spending, visualize the amount you're forecasted to spend, and understand your cost drivers. In the next video, we'll look at how to export your billing data for further analysis and create custom dashboards.
