Vantage Launches Resource Costs for GCP

Today, Vantage launches the ability to see resource costs for Google Cloud Platform. Customers can now see which resources are driving costs on Cost Reports as well as create filters for specific resource identifiers. This includes all GCP services where the “resource.global_name” column is populated in the billing export - Compute Engine, Cloud Functions, Cloud Run, Cloud SQL, Cloud Spanner, and App Engine.

Filtering by resource in a Cost Report for GCP.

Before, Vantage had the ability to view GCP costs at the service, project, category, and label levels. However, it was not possible to drill in further to see which specific resources were driving these costs. Vantage supports resource-level costs for AWS, Azure, Databricks, MongoDB Atlas, Snowflake and Fastly — however GCP previously had a platform limitation where unique resource identifiers in their billing exports were absent. Over the past year GCP has added support for several services that make this possible.

Now, customers can view GCP costs broken down by global resource identifiers when viewing a Cost Report and clicking on the “Cost by Resource” button for a specific GCP service. When viewing the list of resource costs it is also possible to click “Costs by Category” for a specific resource to get a breakdown of the types of costs (Compute, Data Transfer, Storage, etc..) which are driving that resource’s costs. GCP resources will now also be included on any Cost Report which is grouped by resource.

GCP resource costs are live for all customers at the time of this blog post. All customers’ GCP data imports have been updated to include the necessary resource data. To get started, head to any Cost Report with GCP present and click “Costs by Resource” for any of the supported services.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. What’s being launched today?

Today we are launching the ability to view GCP costs broken down per resource. Along with viewing the costs for a resource, users can also create Cost Reports filtered to specific GCP resources.

2. Who is the customer?

Any Vantage user who connects Google Cloud as a provider.

3. How much does this cost?

There is no additional cost to viewing costs by resource for GCP.

4. Which GCP services are supported?

• Compute Engine
• Cloud Functions
• Cloud Run
• Cloud SQL
• Cloud Spanner
• App Engine

5. Why was this not supported prior?

When Vantage launched GCP as a provider the resource cost support was limited because of platform limitations imposed by GCP. Over the past year GCP has been adding new services to their billing export data. Going forward Vantage will automatically begin importing all resource costs as they are added to the GCP Detailed Billing Export.

6. Are there plans to add more services?

We are not aware of GCP’s intentions to add more services. However, we recommend contacting your GCP rep to ask for more. It is also possible to label GCP resources with specific identifiers which Vantage will automatically import. This makes it possible to filter and group by specific labels.

7. Can I create a filter for a specific resource for GCP?

Yes, GCP now has a “Resource” dimension to filter by. You can select a service and the list of available resources will be automatically populated.

8. Can I add GCP resources to resource reports?

This functionality is not yet available, but is on our roadmap. The remaining work to be done here is that Vantage must integrate with various service APIs on GCP to profile what resources driving costs are still technically active. For more information on resource reports, see the recent launch post here.

9. I have a GCP integration, but don’t see any resource costs - What is wrong?

If your GCP billing export was created prior to August 11, 2021 you may not have this column present in your BigQuery table. You will have to create a new billing export or contact GCP support to have this column added.