Demo: Billing Administration
1. Demo: Billing Administration
In the upcoming lab, you will examine billing data that we exported for you. Let me show you how to export billing data and demonstrate other common activities that a billing administrator performs. These actions cannot be performed in the Qwiklabs environment because of security restrictions. Therefore, I'm going to walk you through them as a demo. So here I am in the GCP console. And what I want to do is navigate to billing. So I'm going to click on the navigation menu and click on Billing. So here I'm provided with an overview. I'm actually using a trial account, as you can see, but the same concepts apply to any account. We can see the consumption for the current month. In my case, I have some promotional credits here. If I had multiple billing accounts, then you'd be able to choose from them right up here. Again, credits, billing account also has a name. If you go to Payment Overview, you'll can see the payment method that is currently selected. Now, the other really big thing we can do is here is set up budgets and alerts. So if I click on that and then click on Create Budget, I first just give it a name. So you My-Budget-Alert. I can select the specific projects that I want these alerts on. It could just be one, it could be several, click Next. Then the type so either specify an exact dollar amount or I start with my last month spend. So if last month I spent would say a certain dollar amount, it would pull that dollar amount directly in there. In our case, let's say we want to target an amount of $500. It's also including credits in this cost. You could disable that. And then we define the thresholds for the alerts. So by default, it sets up this 50, 90 at a 100%, and the dollar amounts are being pulled from the 500 that I just plugged in there earlier. You can also choose between actual and forecasted. And you can read a little bit more what this forecast it is about here. We could remove these. So let's say maybe we wanted to add an earliest threshold already at 25%, then we could do that. We could even go further and actually connect to a cloud pub/sub topic and then do all sorts of automation as we discussed in the slides. So then from here I can just click Finish. And it's then going to be sending me emails around this. I can also see sort of a menu here that shows how far I've gone in the spend. And so I can come in here at any moment and also see, am I close to that 25% mark already? Then the other thing that's pretty interesting on this page is the Transaction page. So this will show all of the different charges. Again, I have credit in here. So every charge is being offset by credit, but you can see all the different usages that I've had across Compute Engine instances, disk space that I've been using. So you could always go in here. Now more interestingly is to probably export all this information. So if I click on Billing Export, I'm presented with two options. I could export to BigQuery or export it as a file, and to enable that I just choose the one I'm interested in. Let's say BigQuery. And then go to edit settings and then I would define where this is going to go to. In this case, I would have to define a BigQuery data set, so you can navigate there and set it up and click Save. And similarly, if I wanted to export to a file, I could edit those settings as well. In this case, could be exported as a CSV or JSON file and stored in a cloud storage bucket. So I can define the name in here. So I would have to create a bucket first and then give it a prefix. And then it's going to export that to there. The other big thing, I can reviews if I click on payment method. I can review the different payment accounts. Payment profiles, payment method if it's a credit card or bank account. You can review all of that information in there. That's how easy it is to administer billing in GCP. A billing administrator can set up accounts and run reports which are ordinary tasks. But becoming familiar with the available options and seeing how these tasks are performed reduces the chances of confusion. For example, you know that reports can be generated in JSON or CSV format. Now more sophisticated processing or filtering of data occurs after the billing is exported, as you will explore in the next lab.2. Let's practice!
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