Visualize your costs with Looker Studio

Create your copy of the dashboard

(Optional) Configure the data source credentials

By default, the Billing usage dashboard uses your credentials to access the BigQuery data source. If you want to share the dashboard with others, we recommend using a Google Cloud service account to authenticate to the BigQuery dataset, so that the data source isn't dependent on your credentials.

If you used Terraform to copy the dashboard, you get the service account ID when you run the terraform apply command. If you used the Python script, you must manually create the service account, using these steps:

1. Get the email address for the Looker Studio service agent from the Looker Studio service agent help page

2. Create a service account for the Looker Studio service agent

3. Grant the service account the following permissions on the project that has the BigQuery view for the dashboard:

   • bigquery.dataViewer
   • bigquery.jobUser
   • iam.serviceAccountTokenCreator

When you have the service account ID, follow these steps to use the service account for authentication:

1. From your Looker Studio home page, open the dashboard.

2. Click Edit to edit the dashboard.

3. From the Resource menu, select Manage added data sources. The name of the data source for the dashboard starts with billing-export-view.

4. From the Actions column for the data source, click Edit.

5. Click Data credentials.

6. In the Update data credentials page, select Service account credentials, and enter the service account ID.

7. Click Update to use the service account credentials.

8. Click Done to save the changes to the data source.

9. To view the dashboard, click View.

Update the dashboard to use your organization's labels

Several charts in the dashboard, such as those in the Cost Reporting: Labels page, are based on the labels on your resources. To see an accurate breakdown of your costs by specific labels, you must modify the default filters to use your own labels.

1. From your Looker Studio home page, open the dashboard.

2. Click Edit to edit the dashboard.

3. From the Resource menu, select Manage filters.

4. Review filters that are based on labels.key and project.labels.key, and where applicable, click Edit to change the label keys to ones that your organization uses.

   For example, if you use the label key department to organize resources by business unit, edit the business_unit filter, and change the project.labels.key filter to department.

5. Click Close to finish editing the filter.

Analyze your data in the dashboard

The pages in the Looker Studio dashboard break down your cost data so that you can look at quick summaries of your costs and trends, and get detailed information about your spending.

In most pages, you can filter the data by project, and by using the calendar to choose the period for which you want to analyze the costs.

Get a high-level view of your costs

Use the Overview page for a high-level look at the net costs for the current and previous invoice months, the costs for your top services, and daily costs for the last 30 days.

Use the Trends page to compare your costs for different periods, such as the current month and the last month, or the current quarter and last quarter.

Use the Analysis page to analyze your costs over time, and identify anomalies such as unusually high or low spending.

Identify your cost drivers

Use the following pages to find where you're spending the most:

• Cost by service by month
• Cost by project by month
• Cost by project, service, and SKU
• Cost by region

For a detailed look at your costs for each service, use the service-specific pages. For example, the GKE Clusters page shows you the costs broken down by your GKE clusters and namespaces.

Identify opportunities to save with committed use discounts

Committed use discounts (CUDs) provide discounted prices in exchange for your commitment to use a minimum level of resources for a specified term.

The committed use discount (CUD) pages in the dashboard show you your Compute Engine, Cloud SQL, and Memorystore usage that might be eligible for CUDs. If you already have one or more CUDs, these pages only show usage that isn't already covered by your existing CUDs.

View costs for Cloud Marketplace software and additional licenses

Use the Marketplace page to see your costs for software that you've purchased from Cloud Marketplace, such as Google Cloud NetApp Volumes.

Use the Licenses page to see how much you're spending on additional licences, such as licenses for Windows Server on Compute Engine, and third-party licences that you've purchased from Cloud Marketplace.

View costs by labels

You can customize the dashboard's filters to use your organization's labels. After you update the filters, you can use the following pages to view your costs across projects and folders:

• The By application page shows costs for all resources under the label key application. For example, if you have a web and mobile app, and label their resources with application:web and application:mobile respectively, you can see your costs for each application separately.

• The Labels page shows your costs for specific labels, such as cost center and business code. If you customized the filters for the dashboard, you can change the titles on the charts to reflect your filters.

(Advanced) Modify the data for multiple Cloud Billing accounts

If you want the dashboard to include data from multiple Cloud Billing accounts, you can modify the BigQuery views to include the billing data exports for all the Cloud Billing accounts.

Before you begin

For each Cloud Billing account that you want to include, follow all the steps in the tutorial prerequisites.

Update the BigQuery views to include additional Cloud Billing exports

1. In the Google Cloud console, open the BigQuery page.

   Go to BigQuery

2. Select the project that contains the dataset that you created for the dashboard.

3. In the Explorer panel, expand your project, then expand the dataset.

4. Click the billboard view to see its details. This view queries your Standard cost and usage data export.

5. Click the Details tab, then click Edit Query. The query for the view looks similar to the following:

   SELECT *,
     COALESCE((SELECT SUM(x.amount) FROM UNNEST(s.credits) x),0) AS credits_sum_amount,
     COALESCE((SELECT SUM(x.amount) FROM UNNEST(s.credits) x),0) + cost as net_cost,
     PARSE_DATE("%Y%m", invoice.month) AS Invoice_Month,
      _PARTITIONDATE AS date
   from `PROJECT_ID.BILLING_ACCOUNT_EXPORT` s
   WHERE _PARTITIONDATE > DATE_SUB(CURRENT_DATE(), INTERVAL 13 MONTH)
   

   Where PROJECT_ID is the project that contains the BigQuery Standard cost data export for the Cloud Billing, and BILLING_ACCOUNT_EXPORT is the name of the BigQuery table with your Standard cost data.

6. Duplicate the existing query, and in the FROM clause, replace the project ID and BigQuery table with information for the additional Cloud Billing account.

7. Add the UNION ALL operator between the two queries to combine the data. Your final query looks something like the following example, which combines the data exports for BILLING_ACCOUNT_1 and BILLING_ACCOUNT_2, which are in PROJECT_ID_1 and PROJECT_ID_2 respectively.

   SELECT *, --query for BILLING_ACCOUNT_1
     COALESCE((SELECT SUM(x.amount) FROM UNNEST(s.credits) x),0) AS credits_sum_amount,
     COALESCE((SELECT SUM(x.amount) FROM UNNEST(s.credits) x),0) + cost as net_cost,
     EXTRACT(DATE FROM _PARTITIONTIME) AS date
   FROM `PROJECT_ID_1.BILLING_ACCOUNT_1_EXPORT` s
   WHERE _PARTITIONTIME >"2021-01-01"
   UNION ALL
   SELECT *, --query for BILLING_ACCOUNT_2
   COALESCE((SELECT SUM(x.amount) FROM UNNEST(s.credits) x),0) AS credits_sum_amount,
   COALESCE((SELECT SUM(x.amount) FROM UNNEST(s.credits) x),0) + cost as net_cost,
   PARSE_DATE("%Y%m", invoice.month) AS Invoice_Month,
   _PARTITIONDATE AS date
   from `PROJECT_ID_2.BILLING_ACCOUNT_2_EXPORT` s
   WHERE _PARTITIONDATE > DATE_SUB(CURRENT_DATE(), INTERVAL 13 MONTH)
   

8. Repeat these steps for the billboard_detail view, which queries the Detailed cost and usage data.

9. If one of your accounts is in a different currency than USD, repeat these steps, and use the currency_conversion_rate column to convert to USD, similar to the following example:

   select *,
     (COALESCE((SELECT SUM(x.amount)
     FROM UNNEST(s.credits) x),0))/currency_conversion_rate AS credits_sum_amount,
       (COALESCE((SELECT SUM(x.amount)
       FROM UNNEST(s.credits) x),0))/currency_conversion_rate + cost/currency_conversion_rate as net_cost,
       'USD' as net_cost_currency,
        PARSE_DATE("%Y%m", invoice.month) AS Invoice_Month,
         _PARTITIONDATE AS date
   from `PROJECT_ID.BILLING_ACCOUNT_DATASET` s
   WHERE _PARTITIONDATE > DATE_SUB(CURRENT_DATE(), INTERVAL 13 MONTH)