View and manage cost anomalies

Anomaly Detection helps you manage unexpected costs across your billing account's projects. These anomalies are spikes or deviations in usage costs that differ from your expected spend, based on historical patterns. This includes any contracted or negotiated pricing, but excludes committed use discounts and credits.

The Anomalies dashboard displays all cost anomalies associated with your projects, within the linked billing account. Within the Anomalies dashboard, you can:

  • Investigate the root causes of anomalies.
  • Customize your view by setting cost impact thresholds.
  • Set up automated alerts and notifications.
  • Provide feedback on detected anomalies to improve the tool's accuracy.

Anomalies can only be detected for projects with at least six months of historical spend.

Set permissions

You can view and manage anomalies for all projects on a Cloud Billing account or for individual projects. To manage anomalies for all projects on a Cloud Billing account, you need account-level permissions. To view anomalies for a specific project, you only need project-level permissions.

Account-level access

To view and manage cost anomalies on projects across your Cloud Billing account, you need a role that includes the following permissions:

  • billing.anomalies.list to view the Anomalies dashboard.
  • billing.anomalies.get to view the root cause analysis panel.
  • billing.anomaliesConfigs.get to view the Manage anomalies page.
  • billing.anomaliesConfigs.update to update preferences in the Manage anomalies page.
  • billing.anomalies.submitFeedback to provide anomaly feedback.
  • pubsub.topics.setIamPolicy to create and manage Pub/Sub notifications.

To get these permissions, ask your administrator to grant you one of the following predefined Cloud Billing IAM roles on your Cloud Billing account:

  • Billing Account Administrator
  • Billing Account Costs Manager
  • Billing Account Viewer (view only)

Project-level access

If you have limited or no access to a Cloud Billing account, you can still view cost anomalies on projects that you own. To do this, you need a role that includes the following permissions on the project:

  • billing.anomalies.list to view the Anomalies dashboard.
  • billing.anomalies.get to view the root cause analysis panel.
  • billing.anomalies.submitFeedback to provide anomaly feedback.

To get these permissions, ask your administrator to grant you one of the following predefined roles on your project:

  • Project Owner
  • Project Editor

Access the Anomalies Dashboard

To access the Anomalies dashboard, complete the following steps for your access level:

Account-level access

  1. Open the Google Cloud console.
  2. Open the Google Cloud console Navigation menu, then select Billing.
  3. At the prompt, select the Cloud Billing account you want to view anomalies for.
  4. In the Billing navigation menu on the left side of the screen, select Anomalies.

Project-level access

  1. Open the Google Cloud console.
  2. Select the project that you want to view anomalies for. This must be a project that you own.
  3. Open the Google Cloud console Navigation menu, then select Billing.
  4. If you are prompted to choose which billing account you want to view and manage, click Go to linked billing account to view the billing account that is linked to your selected project.
  5. The Overview page opens for the selected billing account.
  6. In the Billing navigation menu on the left side of the screen, select Anomalies.

Analyze root causes

Each anomaly includes a granular root cause analysis (RCA) panel that helps pinpoint the source of the cost spike. Click the anomaly date to open the panel.

The RCA panel displays the top three services that caused the spike in spend. Within each service, you can view the top three regions that contribute to the spike. Within each region, you can view the top three contributing SKUs. If the anomaly is equally spread across services, regions, or SKUs, you won't see any top contributors in the RCA panel.

Manage anomalies

Click Manage anomalies to customize thresholds and alerts. Billing Account Administrators can set threshold and alert preferences. To learn how to provide access to custom roles, see Set permissions.

Set a cost impact threshold

Set a cost impact threshold to focus on significant anomalies. This filters your view to show only anomalies exceeding a certain cost deviation, for example, $200. You can always remove the filter to see all anomalies, but it will re-apply the next time you visit the page.

This threshold value is in your billing account's local currency and can only contain positive numeric values, including up to two decimal places. You cannot use negative or non-numeric values.

Pre-filtering only applies to the Billing Account Administrator, Billing Account Costs Manager, and Billing Account Viewer views. These accounts can remove this filter to view all anomalies. All other users, including Project Owners, view all anomalies as they are detected but can manually filter the anomalies page.

Set up alerts and notifications

You can set up alerts and notifications for anomalies that cross the defined cost impact threshold using email or Pub/Sub.

  • Email: Select a cadence (alerts for every individual anomaly or a daily summary) for a set of recipients:

    • Billing Account Administrators
    • Essential Contacts
      • Checking the Essential Contacts box for an individual anomaly will send notifications to the designated Essential Contacts, under the "billing" category, for that project.
      • Checking the Essential Contacts box for daily summary will send notifications to the designated Essential Contacts, under the "billing" category, for the organization.
    • Project Owners
      • Project Owners can only receive notifications for individual anomalies on projects they own.

  • Pub/Sub: Connect to a topic to receive anomaly alerts programmatically. Pub/Sub sends notifications approximately every hour. See Publish and receive messages in Pub/Sub for more information.

You can change these settings at any time.

Optimize Anomaly Detection

The AI-powered anomaly detection algorithm constantly learns and improves, but your feedback helps it adapt faster to your business needs. To provide feedback:

  1. Click the date of the anomaly to open the RCA panel.
  2. Under Is this an anomaly?, select one of the following options:
    1. Yes, it's an unexpected cost increase: Select this option if the anomaly is unexpected and an unintended cost increase.
    2. Yes, but it's an expected cost increase: Select this option if the anomaly is an expected cost increase to meet your business needs. You can provide more context around the specific business reason (for example, if you have active migrations underway, are using new Google Cloud resources, or if the cost increase is temporary) to help our models adapt.
    3. No, the cost impact is insignificant: Select this option if the anomaly has a cost impact that you don't consider to be significant.
  3. Click Submit feedback.

Once submitted, your feedback is recorded with a timestamp.

If you need to change previously submitted feedback, it can be done by following the same steps as submitting the original feedback:

  1. Open the RCA panel.
  2. Change your selection using the provided options.
  3. Click Submit feedback.