Visualize Google Cloud Billing data in Grafana with BigQuery

Wouldn't it be nice to have your infrastructure GCP billing along with with your infrastructure monitoring dashboard?

Let's get started!

Export GCP Billing to BigQuery

Reference: https://cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/export-data-bigquery

Summarized Steps

• Create a BigQuery data set. GCP will save the Billing data here.

• Go to Billing console and configure the Billing export.

BigQuery

First, let's ensure that the billing data are already exported.

Let's say we want to know how much cost was incurred per service from April 1, 2020. The SQL query would be this.

SELECT service.description as service, currency, sum(cost) AS cost
FROM `DATASET_NAME.gcp_billing_export_v1_*`
WHERE usage_start_time >= "2020-04-01 00:00:00 UTC"
GROUP BY service, currency
ORDER BY cost DESC

Example result

Grafana

Finally, use the example configuration to visualize the query in Grafana.

This is the equivalent query.

SELECT $__timeGroupAlias(usage_start_time, 1d),
  service.description AS metric,
  sum(cost) AS cost
FROM `DATASET_NAME.gcp_billing_export_v1_*`
WHERE $__timeFilter(usage_start_time)
GROUP BY 1, 2
ORDER BY 1, 2

• $__timeGroupAlias and $__timeFilter are Grafana SQL macros.
• The column that is aliased as metric will be the labels to be shown and grouped in the graph.

The End

Any question? Let me know in the comments section!

Thanks for reading!