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Monthly Reports from GCP Project#

Overview#

This document explains how to generate monthly billing reports from Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
These reports help us track cloud costs per service, resource usage trends, and budget planning for the AIRCHECK project.

The final output will include:

  • Monthly cost summaries

  • Per-service cost breakdown

  • Visualizations of spending trends

  • Insights for the monthly meeting

Prerequisites#

Before you start, make sure you have:

  • GCP account access with Billing Admin or Viewer role

  • Access to the GCP Billing Account

Step 1 — Open the Billing Reports Page#

  1. Go to GCP Console

  2. Click the menu (☰) in the top-left corner.

  3. Select Billing → Reports.

Step 2 — Select Time Range#

  • Choose Current Month to see this month’s costs so far.

  • Choose Previous Month to compare against last month.

  • You can also select Custom Range to analyze any specific period.

Step 3 — Group Costs by Service and SKU#

In the Billing Reports page, there’s a “Group By” dropdown.
Select:

  • Service → Shows costs per GCP product, e.g., Vertex AI, BigQuery, GCS, Dataproc, Cloud Run, etc.

  • SKU → Shows costs at a more detailed level, like:

    • “Cloud Storage (Standard Storage Regional, Long-Term Physical Storage)”

    • “BigQuery Storage (per GB)”

    • “Compute Engine (N2 Instance Core for region(s), E2 Instance Core for region(s) ”

You can also combine grouping:

  • Group by Service + SKU → Gives both the high-level service and its detailed cost components.

Step 4 — Understanding What You See#

When you group by Service:

  • You’ll see total costs per GCP service

    • Example:

      • Vertex AI → $200

      • BigQuery → $75

      • GCS → $40

When you group by SKU:

  • You’ll see specific resource costs within a service

    • Example (Vertex AI):

      • Training hours → $150

      • Prediction requests → $50

When you group by Service + SKU:

  • You’ll see a hierarchical view:

    Vertex AI → Training vCPUs → $150 → Prediction API Requests → $50 BigQuery → Active Storage → $40 → Query Processing → $35

Step 5 — Download the Report#

You can export the billing report directly:

  • Click Download CSV

  • Choose Current Month or Previous Month