Optimize resource costs and utilization

The Optimization board displays summary cost and utilization data for Google Cloud services. You can view the following information:

  • The total cost and cost trend for a selected project or App Hub application.
  • The top five resources or application workloads with the highest cost along with their cost change.
  • The five most expensive resources or workloads with lowest utilization.

To see costs for more resources and workloads, you can use Cost Explorer.

Limitations and considerations

The following limitations and considerations apply to displayed data:

  • During private Preview, some cost and cost change data might be incomplete, including data for Compute Engine managed instance groups and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) zonal clusters.
  • Costs are displayed in US dollars. You cannot change the currency.
  • In application view, you can't view or filter resources by location.
  • Costs for Compute Engine VMs and Compute Engine managed instance groups and GKE clusters does not include network charges for data egress or Persistent Disk usage.

Before you begin

The Optimization page uses Cloud Billing to retrieve cost data, and Cloud Monitoring for utilization metrics. To use the Optimization page, you need access to Monitoring data and configuration information, as well as the ability to view Cloud Billing data.

To view data for App Hub applications, ensure that the following steps are complete:

  1. Set up App Hub for an app-enabled folder and create your applications. Learn about app-enabled folders.

  2. Set up aggregation of logs, metrics, and traces for your applications.

Required roles

Viewing data on the Optimization page requires different permissions depending on whether you are viewing the page by project or by application.

Project view

To get the permissions that you need to view cost and utilization data for a project, ask your administrator to grant you the following IAM roles on the project:

  • View utilization data: Monitoring Viewer (roles/monitoring.viewer)
  • View costs: Viewer (roles/viewer) or a custom role with the billing.resourceCosts.get permission

Application view

To get the permissions that you need to view cost and utilization data for an application, ask your administrator to grant you the following IAM roles on the app-enabled folder:

  • View utilization data: Monitoring Viewer (roles/monitoring.viewer)
  • View costs: Viewer (roles/viewer) or a custom role with the billing.resourceCosts.get permission
  • View data for applications: App Hub Viewer (roles/apphub.viewer)
  • View folder data: Folder Viewer (roles/folder.viewer)

If your administrator already granted you the Cloud Hub Operator (roles/cloudhub.operator) role or App Management Viewer role (roles/apphub.appManagementViewer), the Monitoring Viewer permissions are included in those roles.

Making changes based on your analysis of costs, such as applying a recommendation from Active Assist or changing the billing option for Cloud Run, requires additional permissions or coordination with a member of your organization who has the required permissions.

View costs and utilization

To view costs and utilization for a project:

  1. In the Google Cloud console, go to the Optimization board:

    Go to Optimization

  2. Select the project or application that you want to view:

    • To view data for a project, select the project from the project picker in the toolbar.
    • To view data for an application, select an app-enabled folder from the project picker in the toolbar. If you don't know which folder to select, then ask your administrator.

  3. To filter data for a specific product, location, or historical time range, select an option from the Product, Location, or time range filters.

    The Optimization board shows the following information:

    • Cost trend: Total costs for the selected filters.

      • Total gross cost: displays the total cost of usage for the selected filters. The total is based on your contract prices, before any committed use discounts or other credits are applied. For an application, the total cost includes all resources that are fully used by the application and doesn't include costs for resources that are shared across applications.
      • Cost change: displays the change in gross cost. The change is calculated based on the time period you selected. For example, if 7 days and the current date is April 30, 2025, the change percentage is a comparison between data from April 23 to April 29 and data from April 16 to April 22.

    • Resources by cost and utilization: This section lists top resources to consider for further investigation.

      For a project: displays the top five resources with the highest cost and cost change and the top five resources with high cost and lowest utilization.

      • To further explore costs, click a specific resource name to view details for that resource.
      • To view more detailed cost information, click View details in Cost Explorer. The view in Cost Explorer is filtered to show the same project, product, location, and time range as the Optimization page.

      For an application: displays the top five workloads and services with the highest cost and cost change and the top five workloads and services with high cost and lowest utilization.

      • To further explore costs, click a specific workload or service name to view details for that workload or service.
      • To view more detailed cost information, click View details in Cost Explorer. The view in Cost Explorer is filtered to show the same application, product, location, and time range as the Optimization page.

For more information about using Cost Explorer, see Optimize costs with Cost Explorer.

Since utilization is only one aspect of cost for Google Cloud services, we recommend that you use data on the Optimization board in the context of other cost-optimization features and best practices that are available for the services you use. For example, Compute Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), and Cloud Run provides committed use discounts. Cloud Run also lets you choose from different billing options based on how you use your instances.

What's next