CODEWITHSUNDEEP
google-cloud-platformgoogle-bigquerygoogle-cloud-functionsgoogle-cloud-billing
Anonymous
Anonymous

Reputation: 29

Monitoring GCP spend without access to Billing API

I run a small research group at a large university that manages hundreds of GCP accounts. The university acts as the Billing Administrator, and my research group was assigned a GCP "project" for all of our work. However, for privacy reasons, they cannot give me access to the Billing API because this would allow me to see the billing details for other labs.

Because we have trainees in our lab who WILL make mistakes, I would like to setup an automated system that monitors our current GCP bill, and (1) sends notifications or (2) terminates all VMs, when that bill reaches certain predefined limits. For example, if our monthly budget is $10k, then I would like to receive a notification at $5k, another notification at $10k, and I would like to terminate all VMs at $15k.

My problem is that in order to implement a system like this, I need access to the Billing API. I have already contacted my system administrator and they have said that this is impossible. Instead, they proposed that I write a script that lists all VMs and uses the Cost Calculator to estimate my monthly GCP bill.

However, this seems a little circuitous. When I am using the Google Cloud Console, I can see the total and forecasted costs for my project, so it seems that I should be able to access this information programmatically. However, I cannot find any information on how to do this, since all solutions require me to activate the Billing API. Any ideas?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 699

Answers (1)

John Hanley
John Hanley

Reputation: 81336

There is no API to fetch the data you see in the Google Cloud Console. You will need to export the billing data and then process each row of data to generate reports.

There are two options that I can think of:

Option 1) Ask the admin to set up billing data export to BigQuery. Grant you permission to query the billing tables. You can then query BiGQuery to generate your own cost reports.

Set up Cloud Billing data export to BigQuery

Option 2) Create a separate billing account for your project and grant you permission. A GCP ORG can have multiple Billing Accounts tied to the same Payments Account. This option supports creating budget alerts.

Upvotes: 1

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