Viewing usage reports
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Compute Engine lets you export detailed reports of your
Compute Engine usage to a Cloud Storage bucket
using the usage export feature.
Usage reports provide information about the
lifetime of your resources. For example, you can see how many VM instances in
your project are running an n2-standard-4 machine type and how long each
instance has been running. You can also review the storage space of a persistent
disk, and information about other Compute Engine features.
Usage reports don't provide billing or activity information, such as
information about API requests. For billing information, see
Export Cloud Billing data to BigQuery.
For a record of administrative activities and accesses within your
Google Cloud resources, see
Audit logs.
Before you begin
If you haven't already, set up authentication.
Authentication verifies your identity for access to Google Cloud services and APIs. To run
code or samples from a local development environment, you can authenticate to
Compute Engine by selecting one of the following options:
Select the tab for how you plan to use the samples on this page:
gcloud
Install the Google Cloud CLI.
After installation,
initialize the Google Cloud CLI by running the following command:
To use the Python samples on this page in a local development environment, install and
initialize the gcloud CLI, and then set up Application Default Credentials with
your user credentials.
When you enable usage reports, Compute Engine delivers two types of
reports to the Cloud Storage bucket you specify:
Daily usage reports
These reports are delivered daily and include usage data from the
preceding day. Each report is a separate file that contains
data from the last period. Data in these reports are immutable,
meaning that Compute Engine does not update or rewrite the log
file if there are inaccuracies. Instead, the data is corrected in the
next new report that is delivered to the bucket.
Daily usage reports have the following name format:
A single monthly rollup report is delivered daily, which contains monthly
usage data for that project up to, but not including, that day. The monthly
usage report is overwritten each day with new data that reflects the
monthly usage of resources up to that date. There is only one monthly
usage data file per project, per month.
Monthly rollup reports have following name format:
The daily and monthly report files look very similar, except for the
difference in date format, where the monthly rollup reports are dated
using the year and month (YYYYMM), and the daily usage reports are dated
using the year, month, and date (YYYYMMDD).
All usage reports are delivered in
comma-separated values (CSV) format
and usage report files are prefixed using <report_prefix>. The
<report_prefix> is a customizable value chosen by the user. If you don't
specify a report prefix, the prefix usage_gce is used by default. All times
are given in Pacific time (PST).
Prerequisites
Before you can start using Compute Engine usage export:
When you first enable the usage export feature, the first report is sent
the following day, detailing the previous day's usage. Afterwards, you
receive reports in 24 hour intervals.
When you enable this feature, you must define two properties:
The Cloud Storage bucket where you would
like your reports to be delivered.
You can select any Cloud Storage bucket for which you are an owner,
including buckets that are from different projects. This bucket must exist
before you can start exporting reports and you must have owner access to
the bucket. Cloud Storage charges for usage, so you should review
Cloud Storage pricing for information on how you
might incur charges for the service.
Any user who has read access to the Cloud Storage bucket can view
the usage reports in the bucket. Any user who has write access to the
bucket can create, view, and modify existing files in the bucket. For more
information, see the Access control section.
The report prefix for your files.
You can specify the report prefix to use for your usage reports. Your usage
reports then have filenames that contain this prefix. For example,
specifying "my-cool-project-report" as your report prefix results in a
filename similar to the format
my-cool-project-report_1234567890_20131230.csv. If you don't specify a
report prefix, the default prefix usage_gce is used.
After you decide on these two properties, you can enable the usage export
feature in the following ways:
After you start receiving usage reports in your bucket, download your reports
like you would download other objects from Cloud Storage. For more
information, see Download objects.
Supported metrics
Daily usage reports provide usage information about the following resources:
Virtual machines
Persistent disks
Images
Snapshots
Static IP addresses
Load balancers
Reservations
Each resource is described using the following metrics:
Metric Name
Metric Properties
Report Date
Metric Type: string
Description: The date of the usage.
Example: 2019-08-15
MeasurementId
Metric Type: string
Description: The ID of the type of resource that is being measured.
For example, VmimageN2StandardCore_Uswest2 to represent
an n2-standardmachine type
in us-west2.
When you enable the usage export feature for a Cloud Storage bucket,
Compute Engine automatically adds itself to the bucket with write
access in order to deliver usage reports. As long as Compute Engine
has access to the bucket and the usage export feature is enabled,
Compute Engine continues to export usage reports to the specified
Cloud Storage bucket.
You can identify that Compute Engine has access to a bucket if you
see the following identity added to the bucket IAM policy:
cloud-cluster-analytics-export@google.com
Any user who is an owner of the project has full access to the
Cloud Storage bucket. Other users, such as writers and readers, have
different degrees of access to the bucket. To learn about IAM
for a bucket, read
IAM for Cloud Storage.
If you disable the usage export feature, Compute Engine automatically
removes write access from Compute Engine to the bucket.
If you modify the permissions on the cloud-cluster-analytics-export@google.com
account and then disable the usage export feature, Compute Engine
disables the usage export feature but doesn't remove the account from the
project access list. You can remove the account manually.
Checking if usage reports are enabled
You can check on a project's usage export settings by getting
information about the project:
When you disable usage reports, Compute Engine automatically removes
write access for Compute Engine to your Cloud Storage bucket
and stops sending new reports.
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