Reconcile GCP Costs within CloudHealth: Total Costs From GCP Are Not Matching with CloudHealth

Products

• CloudHealth

Issue/Introduction

 

GCP Total Cost Discrepancies Summary

Total cost discrepancies usually fall under two different types:

• A misconfiguration of the billing project 
• Missing or incomplete data during the month in question

For a misconfigured billing project, the recommended action is to follow the instructions in the platform to get the project Healthy.

For any situation where data is missing or incomplete, a ticket should be submitted to Technical Support to investigate further.

The following documentation provides methods that you can use to determine the nature of the total cost discrepancy.

Resolution

Billing Project Health

A large number of total cost discrepancies boil down to a misconfigured GCP billing project.  The first thing to check is to ensure that it's in a "Healthy" state before attempting to troubleshoot a cost discrepancy further.

 

Ensure Billing Project Configuration is Healthy

Take a look at billing project configuration in the CH platform to ensure that it all looks good.  A billing project in Critical status could be a quick answer to why data isn't adding up as expected.  The easiest way to check is to navigate to SETUP > ACCOUNTS > GCP BILLING and review the status on the right hand side.

Billing project health is the most important priority when working with cost differences so always click the associated "Warning" or "Critical" banners and resolve the issues listed.  This single step could resolve any cost issues that were being experienced.  

 

NOTE   If overall total costs line up after the above steps are taken, this indicates that CloudHealth is ingesting all of the correct cost and any other differences may simply come down to different categorizations.

 

Compare Datasets

There are a few reasons that total costs won't line up but generally GCP discrepancies usually boil down to misconfigured infrastructure.  If you have already checked billing project health, the next step is understanding the data that is being compared to ensure that the issue isn't simply an inconsistent comparison.

 

Confirm that the Comparison is Apples to Apples

Always double-check that the data you are comparing is the same from GCP and CH. 

 

Note the Date the Request was Sent

Double-check the date of the information being compared.  A good example is looking for a discrepancy from GCP to CH in the first week of a new month as costs may not have finalized which could be the cause.

 

Find the Differences

If the billing project is Healthy but there is still a substantial difference (over 1% total spend) in total cost, it's important to try and pinpoint the billing/service item(s) responsible for the discrepancy.  This can potentially be the most time consuming part of the reconciliation process.  It's recommended you spot check data to try and nail down where differences could be between services without the need of digging through spreadsheets.  If it's not quickly identified, you will most likely need to download .csv details by service from CloudHealth and find a similar view from Cost Explorer if available.  The best way to do this is the following:

• Navigate to the Cost History Report
• Categorize by "Product Categories" (this should be default)
• Filter to the specific month in question
• Click the "Actions" dropdown and select "Download as .csv"

 

NOTE If the issue spans all months then it's still recommended to isolate a single month for simplicity's sake.  Just ensure that the data received matches up correctly.

 

Once you have data displayed by product category from the GCP console, you can begin to line up the service costs and locate where differences exist.  The easiest way to achieve this is by copy and pasting the data into the same spreadsheet and ensuring like product costs are lined up on the same row.  Then you can create a "DELTA" column where you subtract each cost item from the other to note differences.  Here is an example of how this could look:

 

In the example above (which illustrates AWS costs) you can see that a large difference is falling under "RDS - Compute" so that would be a good area to focus on.  You can use this same method when lining up GCP product category costs to try and isolate where the discrepancy is.  

If there appears to be a discrepancy across all or most product categories, that may be a sign that there is missing or incomplete data captured for that month so altering the view to "Daily" may bring to light problem timeframes with lower than normal output.

 

Check the Daily View

There are situations where the total cost won't line up correctly because daily costs weren't fully ingested for a day or number of days.  Looking at the daily view is a great way to quickly get an idea of if the total cost being off is due to missing or incomplete daily data.   Daily reporting anomalies may manifest looking like gaps or very low cost in comparison to surrounding days that can tip you off to a problem:

If you do see a daily period of time that is missing or low, this is definitely the cause of total costs being off and will require a ticket so Technical Support can take a deeper look at the issue.