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Cloud bills and cost management
Verify billing periods and synchronization, review allocation by project and resource, and distinguish estimated from realized savings.
On this page
Before enabling billing
- Your license includes cost management, the account’s billing integration is configured and its credentials have the necessary read access.
- Confirm billing period, payer account, currency and tax basis. Mid-month data may differ from the final statement.
- Google Cloud billing relies on detailed BigQuery exports. Enable exports in the cloud console and configure the account’s export table and location. If the table is not created yet, allow it to appear rather than repeatedly changing credentials.
Synchronize and verify bills
- Select the account and billing period and inspect synchronization state and last update. Incomplete or partial reads are not a complete statement.
- Check read and posted counts, amounts and currencies against the provider statement on the same basis.
- On failure, read the existing task and reason before creating another. A failed refresh does not mean the period has no cost.
- After enabling automatic sync, check actual tasks and update times, not just the toggle. Successful sync still needs scope and completeness review.
Review allocation and budgets
Review allocation by project, resource and owner, prioritizing missing or incorrect assignments. Keep records of rules and manual changes; avoid evaluating team budgets or optimization with unverified incomplete data.
Review currencies separately instead of summing them directly. Budgets, forecasts and trends need consistent periods and complete data. Missing months are not zero cost, and forecasts do not guarantee future bills.
Recommendations and realized savings
| Stage | What to confirm |
|---|---|
| Idle candidate | Resource state, observation time, billing match and business-owner review |
| Estimated savings | Estimate assumptions and scope; a recommendation is not an executed action |
| Optimization action | Exact target, impact, permissions and required approval |
| Realized savings | Compare the following complete period with the baseline and have the cost owner verify it |
When amounts do not match
- Align account, period, currency, taxes, refunds and finalization state before comparing totals.
- Check whether manual imports and provider synchronization are mixed and whether historical sources need review.
- Keep synchronization times and affected scope and share a redacted summary, not complete bills or cloud secrets.
Something differs from your environment?
Send your deployment version, page and a redacted description so we can investigate and update the guide.
weiwendi@aiops.red