A sudden increase in storage sent bytes metrics

[gause]

Hello,

I suddenly encountered a rapid increase in sent bytes metrics of my google cloud storage. 

I am using metrics to count sent bytes for each bucket per month. These metrics have the following setup:

Was there some change in counting sent bytes for buckets, that could cause this rapid increase? Or I am counting these sent bytes wrong?

My bill stayed the same for April as for March, so there is no increase in payments, event if the metrics were right it should correspond to a higher value. 

[KirTitievsky]

I don't believe there were any changes to the measurement, but I'll check. I can offer a couple possible explanations:

• You've started reading the data from a VM or another GCP service in the same region. This would not increase your GCS bill, but would increase the number of bytes. You can confirm this by looking at whether you see more GET API requests using the storage.googleapis.com/api/request_count metric filtered or grouped by Method.
• You migrated this bucket from multi-region to dual or single region bucket on Mar 30th or so.  The bytes sent metric is not measured for multi-region buckets.   This would mean you've deleted and recreated the bucket, so probably not likely. 
• You've migrated a job that used to read from a single or dual region bucket from a remote region to the same region where data is stored around March 30th.  It seems we don't report bytes sent to remote regions. 

Reference: https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/bandwidth-usage

[gause]

Thanks for your response.

What is the best way to calculate the cost for a single bucket? 

[KirTitievsky]

At the moment, you'd need to grab your metrics from monitoring and do the multiplication by prices for each metric yourself.  E.g. [bytes stored metric value] * $/GB-month + [operations]*$/operation, etc. You can turn these into a monitoring metric, of course, or just do it as a one off. 

[gause]

Can you please give me a full example of how to do this?

How to set up each billed variable in metric explorer for one single bucket per month. I don't need metrics to show me dollars, just values I will take and then multiply by $ value per unit.

[KirTitievsky]

It looks like you've already created a chart to get this going. The next step is to "+ Add Filter" select a bucket you care about in the Monitoring UI.  If you don't know which bucket you are looking for, "+ Group by" and add "bucket" as dimension.

If you want to do math on the metrics, click on the "Code Editor" button in the upper right corner.  The language reference is here. 

Does this help?

[gause]

Hi Kir,

Unfortunately, this wasn’t much helpful for us. We really need to know how the final bill is calculated based on the bytes sent. We are currently unable to retrieve this information from the metric’s explorer. Our legal and accounting team needs to verify how the data is calculated.

[KirTitievsky]

Not sure how exactly to help here since I don't know what the legal team wants to find out and at what level of detail.  Here are some suggestions:

• Your GCP contract, if you have an off-line contract, might specify specific rules for how your bill is calculated. 
• If not,  our pricing page    is the primary guide to how the calculations are done. 
• You may want to consider enabling the Billing Exports to get detailed information about usage, charges and prices used to compute these charges in detail. 

If this is a general question about how the bill is calculated, it's a great question for your Google Cloud sales person. Do you work with one?