So what to do from here? There are a couple options. Most folks will want to enable the Billing export so that they can get a daily detailed bill (file) that they can analyze in more detail as a traditional analysis in MS Excel or whatever tools they are familiar with. To enable, just jump down to the Billing export item from the Billing menu and click through the dialogs.

There is also a BigQuery export which is where we will focus because it is much easier/simpler, sustainable, and with Data Studio, logical.

For the File export it will take a day to appear in the bucket that you setup/specify (must create ahead). Once it is available, you can download it to review.

For the BigQuery export you need to create a dataset first. Follow the dialogs and once in the BigQuery UI, click the small down arrow to the right of your project name > Create new dataset. Give it a name, location, and data expiration.

Create new dataset

Create Dataset

Once this is done, head back to the Billing interface and Enable BigQuery export.

There are obviously costs associated with GCS (storage) and BigQuery when you enable either of these options and you may want to review them prior to enabling as discussed in the cost section above.

In a couple hours you will start to see the BigQuery table while for the File export you will likely need to wait overnight. There will be no backfill for either export as this is strictly move-forward. If you wanted to analyze previous costs unfortunately there isn’t much you can do.

Analyzing Costs: BigQuery w/Data Studio

There is a lot you could do with your cost data in BigQuery and I am sure large companies have a set of views they refer to at some interval. As for my use case, I would like to get to get visibility into two items:

What is my day/day cost? What is the per-GAE application cost?

The sub-text to most of these questions is, “Where can you save money? What can you shutdown?” I will not be cover that in this how-to.

While looking at tools to answer this question to make sure I was not re-creating the wheel, I ran into Google Data Studio (link). This looks like a beta offering that has a BigQuery connector for visualizing data. The beginning of this tutorial is also well documented in Google’s example (link) of you prefer to follow it there.

After you click the sign up button, you are dropped into a somewhat familiar Google Drive looking interface albeit with a few more options.