Welcome to "Identify Resource Costs." In this lesson, we're going to take a look at how you can use cloud billing reports to identify, monitor, and optimize your GCP costs. Now, by using the Cloud Billing Reports page, you can easily view all of your Google Cloud usage costs. You can also use it to review cost trends, to see which projects are costing you the most money, and to see what each cloud service is costing you. You can even use billing reports to see your spending breakdown by region.

Now to access the Cloud Billing Reports page, what you do from your dashboard here is browse to Billing underneath Home here, in the left pane. And what that does is take you to the Billing page that gives you all these different options. You can look at your actual billing reports, a cost table here. And what this cost table does is allow you to view and download details for a specific invoice month.

Now, I don't have a cost table here because I don't have any usage for my GCP environment for October. But this is where you'd see all of your information regarding projects, the SKUs, project names, what services description you're using, all this cool information, regarding the costs for your subscription.

Cost breakdown here allows you to show your base usage costs. And as you see up here, it's exactly what it tells you here. This cost breakdown allows you to look at your base usage cost and how that cost was affected by credits, adjustments and taxes. So essentially it's a breakout of your total costs. The dropdown here allows you to look at your invoice month. So you can split this out by month.

Commitments here, as you might expect, allows you to take a look at a summary of your committed use discounts that you may have purchased, and it's broken out by a commitment type here. From this Committed Use Discounts page, you can even purchase committed use discounts. And then of course you have budgets and alerts, where you can actually create a budget and create alerts to alert you against that budget. So essentially, if you want to keep your monthly costs at let's say $500 or less, you can create a $500 budget, and then create an alert that lets you know when you've hit that budget. I'm not using any budgets and alerts here, but if we create budget here we can see how we could go through the process of selecting a scope, the amount and what actions to take.

And of course we have down here, Billing export. Billing export, we talked about earlier. Now a billing export does is allow you to send your billing data to a big query data set. And that allows you to start doing some external processing of your billing data. And then down here under pricing, we can see here that we can either split this out by SKUs that have historical usage within my account, or we can view all SKUs. Now, essentially this is a listing of SKUs and their prices on the Google Cloud Platform.

Now under here, we see, I have no SKUs with historical usage here, but if I select View all SKUs, I can then see how each different Google service is billed out. For example, I can see, on the GCP Google service of Cloud SQL, we can see its Service ID, it's SKU ID, a description, and then we can see how it's billed. So this particular service is billed by gigabyte and it's per 1 gigabyte. And the list price is $0.19 per gigabyte.

Now essentially what this means, since here if you look under product taxonomy here, we can see it's actually a network traffic. So you're charged $0.19 per gig of egress for a Cloud SQL. And if we get down here, we can see, we can split this out over number of rows per page. We can see compute engine is billed by the gigabyte hour and it's $0.005696347 per gigabyte hour.

Now on this page, we can see different resources here. We can see compute engine resources, more cloud SQL resources, big query, all kinds of stuff here.. And then of course down here, you have your different payment options, your transactions that have occurred, what your payment settings are, and your payment method along with your account management. But as far as resource costs go, this billing page is where you can identify those costs either what you're using via the reports, or via the cost table, or really even the overview page. I mean your overview page is going to give you a current month-to-date cost of your resources and any payments that you've made. So if you want to identify resource costs in your account what you're going to do here is go to this Billing page, take a look at your overview for billing accounts and then use the reports here to track what's your spending on each of your different GCP resources.