Beyond Your Bill — selected guide
Exporting your billing data and creating custom dashboards
Eleven episodes on resource ownership, billing analysis, budgets, commitments, and GKE efficiency
Eleven 2019–2021 episodes explain who owns cloud spending, how to analyze it, and where commitments and GKE sizing can reduce waste. Budget alerts notify teams; they do not impose a spending cap.
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Billing export lets teams ask cost questions beyond the built-in reports. In this 2019 walkthrough, Mark Mirchandani sends billing records to BigQuery, queries them with SQL, and turns the results into dashboards that distinguish services and environments.
Key Points Covered
- Capture history before you need it. Mirchandani recommends enabling export when the billing account is created because the feature shown did not recover detailed data from before enablement. He favors the BigQuery export over the less detailed file export. 00:00–01:36(opens in a new tab)
- Give the records a destination. The setup selects a project and BigQuery dataset, optionally dedicated to cost management. Records arrive as services update their costs, and storing this billing data can itself incur BigQuery charges. 01:36–02:26(opens in a new tab)
- Query by the distinctions your team needs. The first example totals each service's spending by month. Location, project, and label fields support other breakdowns; environment labels let a dashboard compare production with development costs. 02:26–04:06(opens in a new tab)
- Dashboards reuse the exported data. The demo connects BigQuery to Data Studio, either through a sample billing report or a custom report. Charts and filters then make the same cost records explorable without rewriting a SQL query for every view. 03:14–05:03(opens in a new tab)
Full video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZyMO9XabUUM(opens in a new tab)