Help me Understand and Trace Billing for Cloud Monitoring and Logging

[erickeloi]

Hello Google Cloud Community,

I'm reaching out to seek insights into an issue we're experiencing with billing related to Cloud Monitoring and Cloud Logging within one of our projects on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Despite operating with somewhat consistent workloads on Compute Engine and Cloud Run, and collecting some custom metrics and logs, our billing statements have been somewhat unpredictable.

Here’s the situation:

• In mid-March (March 17 until March 31), we incurred costs for 'Metric Volume' and 'Log Storage cost' SKUs. Interestingly, these costs were not present on the first day of March, despite no apparent change in the volume of logs and metrics being received.
• I have delved into the Metric Explorer, analyzing metrics such as 'Global - Metric bytes ingested' and 'Metric bytes ingested', among others related to log metrics. However, these don't seem to directly correlate with the costs shown in our billing.
• Specifically, on March 31, we observed a lower volume (in megabytes) of 'Metric bytes ingested' compared to April 1. Yet, we were charged for 'Metric Volume' on March 31 but saw no such cost on April

Could anyone provide guidance on how to better understand our billing and identify the specific sources of these costs? Is there a more precise method or tool within GCP that can help trace these expenses back to their origin, especially given the apparent discrepancy between metrics ingested and the charges applied?

Any insights or advice would be highly appreciated as we aim to demystify our billing and ensure cost-effective use of GCP services.

Thank you in advance for your assistance.

[AlfredB]

Hi erickeloi,

Welcome to Google Cloud Community.

It seems that there might be a discrepancy between the ingested metrics and 'Metric Volume' charges, also it might have an anomaly as well with your 'Metric bytes ingested' metric and the 'Metric Volume' cost. There could be various potential causes in your scenario, and it's best to reach out with our support team as this needs a deeper investigation.

There is a possibility but we can never be sure, that there could be potential misconfiguration or a bug in the billing system or a change in the pricing structure of the 'Metric Volume' SKU. An increase of the 'Metric Volume' SKU can be related to an increased storage or processing costs.

I hope this information is helpful.

That being said, you can always reach out with GCP Billing support directly.

[mpcm · Accepted solution]

There is an amount of "free" metrics included, and those happen on the start of the month. Ideally these would still appear in billing, but then be discounted, so they could be toggled... but I think they are simply missing from those dates from the value included. If you know how to toggle them, post a reply please.