App Engine Flex Instance - Untracked in the console but still billed. Could not delete to stop bills

[anandakrishnan]

Hi All,

I have been facing a very strange issue with App Engine Flex where I am being billed for one flex instance constantly even though I have deleted all the services and disabled the App Engine service itself. There are no instances showing in the console, but I could see associated error logs stating one instance is still running. Could not find a way to delete the untracked and unutilized instance for which I am still being billed.

What did I do?
We were using an App Engine Flex service along with a few other App Engine standard services. As part of migration activity, we managed to shift the workload to our internal infra setup. Since App Engine services were not required further, we deleted all the services except the default (standard service—can't be deleted) and further disabled the App Engine service too.
When we checked the billing reports, it showed us some costs linked to App Engine Flex instance SKUs.

How did I find that one instance is still running?
The console does not show any instance running, but when checked, the cloud logging service had logs related to a runninn flex instance of a service that has been already deleted.

Since it was not tracked in the console I could not find the instance for deletion and also gcloud cli was also not useful for the same. Your help here would be very much appreciated.

[ronnelg]

Hi @anandakrishnan, 

Welcome to Google Cloud Community!

I understand that you are constantly being billed by the App Engine Flex, despite deleting all the services and disabling it. While the app is disabled, it might still incur storage charges as some of them save the container images for every version. Try to delete the bucket created by the App Engine first. 

If it still continues to incur charges, try to disable the billing or shut down the project if there’s nothing else on your project that is currently using it.

For other billing concerns, you can contact or file a ticket to Cloud Billing support as they have the right resources to check and review your project. 

Was this helpful? If so, please accept this answer as “Solution”. If you need additional assistance, reply here within 2 business days and I’ll be happy to help.

[anandakrishnan]

Hi @ronnelg,

Thank you for your helpful suggestions. I am actually being billed for App Engine Flex SKUs (instance core hours and memory) as if I am running a flex instance. So, I am sure that the bill was not for the staging.

Also, on thinking of disabling billing/deleting the project, I won't be able to do that since we are using a few other services like Storage Buckets, VMs, Cloud SQL databases, and a few more. Migrating them will need huge effort.

On checking with billing support too, they asked me to upgrade my support plan that offers technical help, which is again a costly spend.

This is my billing report.

[rmrf]

It is not necessary to subscribe to technical support in order to get support for billing issues. I'm sorry that you were informed of this. Please send me a DM with the billing case number and I will chase it down.

Are you able to search Cloud Logging? (where serviceName is the deleted service name)

labels."appengine.googleapis.com/instance_name"=~"aef-serviceName-"

 Or see instances listed under Managed Instance Groups for the given Flex service?

[anandakrishnan]

Hi @rmrf ,

Thank you for looking into the issue.
Please find the logs of the deleted service

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@rmrf wrote:

Or see instances listed under Managed Instance Groups for the given Flex service?

---

The service has been deleted long ago and its no more listed in the app engine dashboards.

[rmrf]

Thank you for responding with that information, I suggest that you remove the image or redact the project number and service name (PII).

Let me get back to you on resolution of this issue, I expect that we will reopen the internal billing case to track resolution.

[anandakrishnan]

Sure 👍

[muhammedshameem]

Hi, I have found a solution to the issue.

You just have to deploy a standard deployment instead of flexible with the same service name and version name. Then deleting the created service will result in the deletion of the service. I have come across this issue before and this method solved the issue.

[rmrf]

Thank you for posting this, we will add it to our internal KB to allow customers to resolve this.