The Essential GCP Tools for Smarter Cloud Cost Management

The Google Cloud Platform is currently the third largest cloud provider, and it is on track for continued growth. The report suggests that in 2024, Google Cloud's market share has grown to 28% among the top 10 cloud providers and reached 11% of the global cloud market. Furthermore, Deutsche Bank analysts also affirm that Google’s cloud business is growing impressively, predicting that Google’s cloud revenue could reach $38 billion by 2025.

As your business grows and you scale on the Google Cloud Platform, managing it can get tricky. You might need to add more services and resources, which can make things complicated. That's why it's important to have a good GCP  cost management system in place to manage your  Cloud environment.

In this blog, we'll talk about the essential GCP tools for Google Cloud Cost Optimization that can help you save money and avoid wasting resources on the cloud.

What is Google Cloud Cost Optimization?

Google Cloud Cost Optimization is a continuous practice of identifying and eliminating unnecessary cloud spending while also ensuring that your applications perform optimally. This involves a combination of proactive measures and GCP cost optimization strategies, such as rightsizing resources, optimizing resource utilization, and leveraging cost-effective pricing models, budgeting, forecasting, allocation, etc, and reactive measures like analyzing past spending patterns to identify areas for improvement.

The native Google Cloud Cost Optimization Tools

Google Cloud offers a suite of useful tools to help you with your cloud cost optimization objectives. Let’s discuss the top native GCP tools:

1. Google Cloud Billing Reports

The GCP tool provides detailed reports on your spending which allows you to pinpoint cost drivers, identify unexpected spikes, and understand where your money is actually going. It’s a great GCP tool to provide answers to questions such as:

• Where is the majority of my Google cloud spending occurring?
• Which GCP services are the biggest cost drivers?
• Are there any unexpected cost spikes?
• Are we spending more or less than the last billing period?

Features of Google Cloud Billing Reports:

• Granular cost breakdowns by service, region, and project.  
• Customizable reports to analyze spending trends and identify anomalies.
• Get forecasted spending based on historical usage patterns.

2. Google Cloud Pricing Calculator

As a cost or ROI continuous business, before you launch a new project or scale existing workloads, you would usually like to get an idea of how much a specific deployment costs. Or maybe what are the pricing options for different services and configurations? This GCP tool provides great help in estimating the cost of various GCP services based on your specific business/ project needs. You can experiment with various configurations, compare pricing plans, and choose the best-suited plan for your business. This proactive approach saves you from unexpected charges by planning in advance, and your projects do not exceed their budgets.

Features of Google Cloud Pricing Calculator:

• Allows you to estimate costs for Compute Engine, Cloud Storage, BigQuery, and other GCP services.
• Helps with budgeting and cost forecasting.
• Also helps to choose the best storage locations. Thus, organizations using BigQuery can significantly benefit from this GCP tool.

3. Google Cloud Recommender

This GCP Tool works like your personal cloud optimization advisor. It analyzes your GCP usage patterns and provides personalized recommendations for improving resource utilization, rightsizing instances, optimizing storage, and more. These recommendations are based on Google Cloud Platform's best practices.

Features of Google Cloud Recommender:

• It identifies underutilized resources and rightsizing options.
• It provides tailored recommendations based on your specific usage patterns.
• It can be integrated with Google Cloud FinOps Hub to provide better cloud cost-saving recommendations.

4. Google Cloud Cost Table

The Google Cost Table presents an overview of Stock Keeping Unit (SKU) pricing for Google Cloud services in a concise format. You can compare cloud spending across tiers and configurations using this GCP tool, as it shows the cost in a tabular format. Additionally, you can quickly identify trends, spot anomalies, and gain valuable insights into your overall cloud consumption. You can identify cost outliers, such as unusually expensive projects, and understand the total cost distribution in your organization.

Features of Google Cloud Cost Table:

• Each view displays SKUs and prices specific to the selected Cloud Billing account:
• A list displaying SKU prices only for the SKUs that have incurred usage.
• A list displaying prices for all Google Cloud and Google Maps Platform services SKUs.
• The report view is customizable and downloadable to CSV for offline analysis.

5. Google Cloud Committed Use Discounts (CUD) Analysis Report

This GCP tool helps you optimize one of your most crucial resources: Compute Engine instances. It analyzes the CPU and memory utilization of your Google Compute Engine instances, identifying underutilized or overprovisioned resources and giving you an idea if you are fully utilizing the commitments or not.  This report enables you to avoid paying for resources that are not being fully utilized, leading to substantial cost savings over time.

Features of Google Cloud CUD Analysis Report:

• It helps analyze the effectiveness of Compute Engine instance utilization. 
• It helps you avoid paying for resources that are not being fully utilized.

6. Google Cloud Operations Suite

Google Cloud Operations Suite is specially designed to help businesses monitor, troubleshoot, and improve the performance of their applications running on Google Cloud.

Features of Cloud Operations Suite:

• Cloud Monitoring: You can monitor and visualize performance metrics for primary services including Compute Engine and Kubernetes Engine (GKE) and receive insights on application and resource health in the cloud.
• Cloud Logging: It collects and stores application and infrastructure logs. You can troubleshoot issues, analyze application behavior, and ensure security and compliance.
• Cloud Trace: Analyzes application request flows to pinpoint where latencies and performance bottlenecks occur.
• Cloud Debugger: Allows cloud developers to inspect and debug applications in real-time without impacting performance. Further, it can quickly identify and resolve code-level issues.
• Cloud Profiler: It constantly monitors application performance to recognize where there is excessive CPU or memory usage, and through this, you can optimize resource use and make applications more efficient.

7. GCP Cloud Console

The GCP Cloud Console acts as your central hub of GCP Cost Management.  It provides:

• Centralized Management: You can access and manage all your GCP  services from a single console.
• Customizable Dashboard: Monitor your GCP resources and applications by creating a personalized dashboard with key performance indicators (KPIs) and widgets.
• Resource Management: This helps you easily create, modify, and delete resources across different GCP services.
• Identity and Access Management (IAM): Control access to your resources by assigning roles and permissions to users and service accounts.

Features of GCP Cloud Console:

• Budget Alerts: Create custom budgets with alerts for cost threshold breaches.
• Detailed Cost Breakdowns: Analyze expenditures by project, service, or SKU.
• Billing Data Export: Export billing data to BigQuery for advanced analytics and reporting.

While the GCP Cloud Console provides visibility and control, please note that it lacks advanced GCP cost optimization features like automated recommendations and forecasting capabilities.

A Quick Snapshot of the GCP Tools

GCP Cost Optimization with CloudKeeper

The native GCP tools are helpful in your GCP cost management journey. However, these GCP tools are standard for all and also have limitations for businesses with complex needs. The native native GCP tools might not always provide the level of granularity, automation, or integration required by some businesses. 

If you are looking for specialized solutions and platforms with deeper insights and tailored GCP cost optimization strategies, we can help. CloudKeeper is a certified Google Cloud Partner that  provides a suite of tools & services to address your specific needs:

• CloudKeeper Lens: A comprehensive Google cloud monitoring platform that provides granular visibility into cloud costs with resource-level breakdowns and tailored recommendations. 
• CloudKeeper AZ: An end-to-end GCP  cost optimization solution that offers guaranteed savings, a cloud cost visibility platform, and 24/7 cloud support.
• Google Cloud Architecture Framework Review: Benchmark your infrastructure against the best practices and design principles created by cloud and FinOps experts.