The flexibility and scalability of the cloud means that your usage can fluctuate dramatically from day to day with demand. And while you always pay only for what you use, customers often ask us to help them better understand their bill.

A prerequisite for understanding your bill is better access to detailed usage and billing data. So today, we are excited to announce the general availability of billing export to BigQuery, our data warehouse service, enabling a more granular and timely view into your GCP costs than ever before.

Billing export to BigQuery is a new and improved version of our existing billing export to CSV/JSON files, and like the name implies, exports your cloud usage data directly into a BigQuery dataset. Once the data is there, you can write simple SQL queries in BigQuery, visualize your data in Data Studio, or programmatically export the data into other tools to analyze your spend.

New billing data is exported automatically into the dataset as it becomes available-- usually multiple times per day. BigQuery billing export also contains a few new features to help you organize your data:



User labels to categorize and track costs

Additional product metadata to organize by GCP services:

Service description

Service category

SKU ID to uniquely identify each resource type

Export time to help organize cost by invoice

Getting started with billing export to BigQuery

It’s easy to export billing data into BigQuery and start to analyze it. The first step is to enable the export, which begins to build your billing dataset, following these setup instructions . Note that you need Billing Admin permissions in GCP to enable export so check you have the appropriate permissions or work with your Billing Admin.

Once you have billing export set up, the data will automatically start being populated within a few hours. Your BigQuery dataset will continue to automatically update as new data is available.