How to find what resources exceed free tier

[auburnham]

Hello,
I recently installed a program called Teslamate on a new Google Cloud VM using these instructions:

https://www.teslaev.co.uk/how-to-setup-and-run-teslamate-for-free-on-google-cloud/

After several days of usage, my daily GCP costs went up dramatically.  I'm guessing this is because the VM exceeded free tier usage at some point, but I can't find a way to see the details of what particular resource (e.g. cpu, memory, network connections/bandwidth) was exceeded.  I don't expect Teslamate to require significant resources, so I believe there may be a problem with my configuration setup that I may be able to resolve if I knew what was driving up the usage/cost.  

Finally, I am familiar with the resource monitoring and utilization graphs/reports available on GCP, I just don't know how to tie that back to billing, especially for the instance that the significant cost increase happened.

Any help/direction is appreciated. Thank you.

[FrancoGP]

Hi @auburnham ,

Welcome to Google Cloud Community!

You could go to the Billing -> Cost Management -> Cost Breakdown or Reports, directly
There you could select to view the report for the Cost Breakdown

And from there filter by project and group them by SKU, you'll be able to determine which resources are being over used and what Promotions are being applied

[auburnham]

Thank you for the suggestion, FrancoGP. Using this approach, I can only see that my "Compute Engine" costs suddenly increased (see screenshot below). I would like to understand which resource of the Compute Engine (e.g. processor utilization, memory, disk space, connections, etc.) is driving this cost increase so I can try to address that consumption in the application. Do you know of a way to get that level of detail from the cost breakdown?  

[alexmoore]

You should be able to render the report based on the SKU.  This should give you a breakdown.

All the best,

Alex

[FrancoGP]

Hey @auburnham!, as alex said while manipulating the report you can group it up by sku or date>sku. This will give you an insight over what type of resource is being used.

If rather than just getting the FinOps part of the usage, as you said, something like memory usage or cpu usage, you should consider implement the VM Ops Agent from the Cloud Observability module so those kind of metrics can be gathered

[auburnham]

Thank you both! Apologies for misunderstanding the original SKU report view direction, but I finally generated that report below.  As you can see, I think it is the "External IP Charge" that is causing the charge jump ~mid-month.

According to the GC Network Pricing, it says "For 0 hour to 1 hour, per 1 month per account", but I'm not sure how to interpret that.  Is there any way to avoid these "External IP Charges"?

One more question: Should I be concerned about the "Data Transfer Out from Americas to South America/Australia"? I did not initiate any data transfer, so is this web access? Can I limit access only to the Americas since this is a personal application?

I really appreciate the assistance!

[FrancoGP]

That's great!

Let me go through some of this items one by one.

I don't know when this infra was set up, but I assume before the 16th only private IP was in use. I don't know if I'm being mislead by the graphic representation but it seems the IP charges are always proportional to your compute usage, so an ephemeral IP setup is there? I've read just a bit of the link you left and it states that would be recommended a static one, but not fully necessary.

Anyways, the only way I can think of avoiding IP charges would be to just use internal IP and connect though some gateway (but that would generate cost to it) or through IAP tunnel, which would be most economic response, but I don't think it would apply to your case.
No mater if in use or not (just static in this case), you'll get charge for that external IP, the free tier will grant you one hour of usage per month per account, so see it as the most tiny discount ever, but free regardless.

I wouldn't worry about data transfer to Australia, the netherlands, Austria or those kinds of items. If you go on in your report you can see there are several pages of it with several items at $0, such  as those. It will display chargeable items for that project based on the enabled API's on it, but doesn't mean they are in use at all.

You could if you want to be a bit more secure create some firewall to only allow your recipient IP. You could make it more secure with some LB and Cloud armor on it, but again, it defeat your purpose of keeping it cheap, so wouldn't recommend it.