Google offers a way of controlling and analyzing your costs through Reports module and BigQuery.
BigQuery enables you to export your daily usage and cost estimates automatically. One of the biggest advantages is that you will be able to filter separate projects, dates, products, services, etc.
It you are an MSP and don't want the client to received the BigQuery charge, make sure that you have an internal Project in Google that you can use so any charges will be billed to your account and not the client's.
There is a free tier for BigQuery but for more information about billing, click here. In our experience, three months of data and 46 projects have costed about $0.4 in BigQuery cost.
How to enable billing export to BigQuery
1. Go to Google Cloud Platform Console and select your internal project:
2. Open the main menu in the top left corner and select Billing.
3. If you have more billing accounts, choose the option Go to linked billing account to manage the billing of the project you have selected. To select a different billing account, click Manage billing accounts.
4. Click on the account you will be exporting
And then click Billing export
5. Select BigQuery export.
6. Select the project where your BigQuery dataset is stored from the Project list. If you don't have any BigQuery dataset yet, you'll be prompted to create one (step 7 below).
7. To create a new dataset (if you don't have any):
In the BigQuery web UI, on the left navigation, click the down arrow next to your project name, then click Create new dataset.
Specify the Dataset ID (no spaces allowed), Data location, and Data expiration, then click OK
8. In the console, go back to Billing - Billing export, select your project from the Project dropdown (if not selected already). Click Edit Settings botton.
Then choose a dataset to export data to from the Billing export dataset list. If you just created a new dataset, select it's name. Click Save.
Note: you only need to do this once per billing account, NOT per project.
After you enable BigQuery export, the system may take a few hours to update your data and make them visible to you. Your data are automatically exported to BigQuery on regular basis, but the frequency of updates in BigQuery can vary depending on the services you're using.
Note: Google starts exporting the data when you configure the export to BigQuery so you will not be able to see the data previous to the day of configuration.
Next step: Set up a BigQuery integration with itopia to get better insights to your billing trends.