Setting up a Google Cloud billing export

This topic describes the billing export that Turbonomic will use to monitor billing data exported to BigQuery. Without this data, Turbonomic cannot discover any cost data used for analysis.

When you export Google Cloud billing data from BigQuery, you can choose to export standard or detailed usage cost data. Turbonomic recommends detailed usage cost data because it includes granular information for VMs, which the platform uses to generate accurate VM scaling actions. This information is also reflected in cloud charts (such as the Workload Cost Breakdown chart) when you set the scope to individual VMs. Note that support for standard usage cost data will be discontinued in a future release.

Setup guidelines:

  • For an overview of billing export, see this Google Cloud page.

  • To set up a billing export, follow the steps in this Google Cloud page.

  • Shortly after you set up a billing export, Google Cloud automatically creates the following billing data tables in the BigQuery dataset. Be sure to record these table names. You will need them later when you add a Google Cloud Billing target in the Turbonomic user interface.

    • Standard usage cost data table

      In your BigQuery dataset, this table is named gcp_billing_export_v1_<Billing_Account_ID>.

    • Detailed usage cost data table

      This table includes all the data fields from the standard usage cost data table, along with additional fields that provide resource-level cost data, such as a virtual machine or SSD that generates service usage. In your BigQuery dataset, this table is named gcp_billing_export_resource_v1_<Billing_Account_ID>.

    • Pricing data export table

      In your BigQuery dataset, this table is named cloud_pricing_export. However, if you have negotiated pricing or are billed in a non-US dollar currency, record the corresponding pricing export table name.

Next step

In Google Cloud, set up a service account for billing data monitoring. For details, see this topic.