Optimize resource costs and utilization

You can view summary cost and utilization data for Google Cloud services on the Optimization page to help you to optimize costs in your projects and App Hub applications. You can also use Gemini for Google Cloud, an AI-powered collaborator, to help you to optimize costs.

Cost data and utilization metrics can help developers and platform administrators in your organization to make informed decisions about optimization opportunities.

This document is for developers and platform administrators who have permissions to view resource cost and utilization data provided by the App Optimize API.

If you manage billing accounts or budgets in Cloud Billing, refer to the following information to help you with cost optimization:

About resource costs

This section describes information about costs that the App Optimize API provides to the Optimization page and Gemini Cloud Assist.

Costs organized by product

Cloud Billing and the App Optimize API categorize product-related costs differently. Cost data that the API provides to the Optimization page and Gemini Cloud Assist is organized logically by product. Cloud Billing groups SKUs for resource usage into services. A service in Cloud Billing might be a subset of a Google Cloud product or might include SKUs from multiple Google Cloud products. These Cloud Billing services are unrelated to App Hub services.

For example, the costs for Compute Engine and GKE products are equivalent to multiple Cloud Billing services.

Product on the Optimization page Service in Cloud Billing
Compute Engine Compute Engine and VM Manager
GKE Compute Engine and GKE
Persistent Disk Compute Engine

The Networking service includes SKUs for many networking products such as Cloud Load Balancing, Cloud NAT, Cloud VPN, Private Service Connect, and Performance Dashboard. The Optimization page categorizes these costs by product, but Cloud Billing only provides a single Networking service and doesn't have defined services for each networking product.

You can search the list of Google Cloud SKUs to learn more about how SKUs are categorized in Cloud Billing.

Cost values

Costs are based on your contract prices, before any committed-use discounts (CUDs) or other credits are applied. For an application, costs include all resources that are fully used by the application and doesn't include costs for resources that are shared across applications.

Cost data availability

Google Cloud products report usage and cost data to Cloud Billing processes at varying intervals. As a result, you might see a delay between your use of Google Cloud services and the usage and costs displayed on the Optimization page or returned by Gemini Cloud Assist. Typically, your costs are available within a day, but can sometimes take more than 24 hours.

Limitations and known issues

  • Costs for Compute Engine VMs, Compute Engine MIGs, and GKE clusters don't include network charges for data egress or Persistent Disk usage. These costs are reported separately.

  • Only some products support resource-level costs.

  • On the Optimization page, you can't view or filter resources by location when you are viewing data for an application.

  • Costs for an application are only available if all application resource costs are in the same currency. If an application has resources associated with different billing accounts, the billing accounts must all be configured for the same currency.

Before you begin

The App Optimize API uses Cloud Billing to retrieve cost data and Cloud Monitoring for utilization metrics. To get cost and utilization data, you need access to Monitoring data and configuration information, as well as the ability to view Cloud Billing data.

  1. To view data on the Optimization page, Ensure that Cloud Hub is set up.

  2. To use Gemini Cloud Assist, Ensure that Gemini Cloud Assist is set up.

  3. Enable the App Optimize API if it is not already enabled. If you set up Gemini Cloud Assist in the Google Cloud console, the App Optimize API is enabled by default as one of the recommended APIs.

    1. In the Google Cloud console toolbar, select the project where you want to enable the API:

      • To view costs and usage for applications, choose the management project in the app-enabled folder. App-enabled folders have an app-enabled folder icon ( ). The child management project also has a unique icon ( ) and the project name is in the format FOLDER-NAME-mp.

      • To view costs and usage for an individual project, choose the project that contains the resources you want to view.

    2. Verify that the API is enabled.

      Go to the App Optimize API page

      If the API is not enabled, click Enable.

Required roles

Viewing data on the Optimization page requires different permissions depending on whether you are viewing the page by project or by application.

Project view

To get the permissions that you need to get cost and utilization data for a project, ask your administrator to grant you the following IAM roles on the project:

  • Enable or disable APIs: Service Usage Admin (roles/serviceusage.serviceUsageAdmin)
  • Get utilization data: Monitoring Viewer (roles/monitoring.viewer)
  • Get costs: Viewer (roles/viewer) or a custom role with the billing.resourceCosts.get permission
  • Use Gemini Cloud Assist: Gemini Cloud Assist User (roles/geminicloudassist.user)

Application view

To get the permissions that you need to get cost and utilization data for an application, ask your administrator to grant you the following IAM roles on the app-enabled folder:

If your administrator already granted you the Cloud Hub Operator (roles/cloudhub.operator) role or App Management Viewer role (roles/apphub.appManagementViewer), the Monitoring Viewer permissions are included in those roles.

Making changes based on your analysis of costs, such as applying a recommendation from Active Assist or changing the billing option for Cloud Run, requires additional permissions or coordination with a member of your organization who has the required permissions.

View costs and utilization

The Optimization page displays the following information:

  • The total cost and cost trend for a selected project or application.
  • The top five resources or application workloads with the highest cost along with their cost change.
  • The five most expensive resources or workloads with lowest utilization.

When you view data for a selected project or application, you can filter the page to display specific products.

For information about which costs are included in displayed cost data, see About costs.

To view costs and utilization:

  1. In the Google Cloud console, go to the Optimization page:

    Go to Optimization

  2. Select the project or application that you want to view:

    • To view costs and usage for applications, choose the management project in the app-enabled folder. App-enabled folders have an app-enabled folder icon ( ). The child management project also has a unique icon ( ) and the project name is in the format FOLDER-NAME-mp.

    • To view costs and usage for an individual project, choose the project that contains the resources you want to view.

  3. To filter data for a specific product, location, or historical time range, select an option from the Product, Location, or time range filters. You can view up to 30 days of data.

    The Optimization page shows the following information:

    • Cost trend: Total costs for the selected filters.

      Figure 1: Cost summary for a project
      Figure 2: Cost summary for an application
      • Total gross cost: displays the total cost of usage for the selected filters.
      • Cost change: displays the change in gross cost. The change is calculated based on the time period you selected. For example, if you select 7 days and the current date is April 30, 2025, the change percentage is a comparison between data from April 23 to April 29 and data from April 16 to April 22. The start of the billing day is at midnight in the US and Canadian Pacific Standard Time (UTC-8) time zone when Pacific Standard Time is in effect. When Pacific Daylight Time is in effect, the start of the billing day is at midnight in the US and Canadian Pacific Daylight Time (UTC-7) time zone.

    • Resources by cost and utilization: This section lists top resources to consider for further investigation. Costs associated with products that aren't supported are classified as Other.

      For a project: displays the top five resources with the highest cost and cost change and the top five resources with high cost and lowest utilization. Resources for a product that aren't supported are classified as Other.

      Figure 3: Cost summary for a project
      • To further explore costs, click a specific resource name to view details for that resource.
      • To view more detailed cost information, click View details in Cost Explorer. The view in Cost Explorer is filtered to show the same project, product, location, and time range as the Optimization page.

      For an application: displays the top five workloads and services with the highest cost and cost change and the top five workloads and services with high cost and lowest utilization.

      Figure 4: Cost summary for an application
      • To further explore costs, click a specific workload or service name to view details for that workload or service.
      • To view more detailed cost information, click View details in Cost Explorer. The view in Cost Explorer is filtered to show the same application, product, location, and time range as the Optimization page.

For more information about using Cost Explorer, see Optimize costs with Cost Explorer.

Since utilization is only one aspect of cost for Google Cloud services, we recommend that you use data on the Optimization page in the context of other cost-optimization features and best practices that are available for the services you use. For example, Compute Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), and Cloud Run provides committed use discounts. Cloud Run also lets you choose from different billing options based on how you use your instances.

Optimize costs with Gemini assistance

This section describes how to use Gemini Cloud Assist to help you optimize costs. If Gemini Cloud Assist is set up for your project or folder, you can access its chat capabilities from any page in the Google Cloud console.

For information about which costs are included in responses to your prompts, see About costs.

Learn how and when Gemini for Google Cloud uses your data.

Open Gemini Cloud Assist chat

  1. In the Google Cloud console, go to any page—for example, the Optimization page.

    Go to Optimization

  2. Select the project or application that you want to view:

    • To view costs and usage for applications, choose the management project in the app-enabled folder. App-enabled folders have an app-enabled folder icon ( ). The child management project also has a unique icon ( ) and the project name is in the format FOLDER-NAME-mp.

    • To view costs and usage for an individual project, choose the project that contains the resources you want to view.

  3. In the Google Cloud console toolbar, click spark Open or close Gemini Cloud Assist chat.

    The Cloud Assist panel opens.

Enter a prompt

In Gemini Cloud Assist chat, you can get assistance by using natural language prompts (questions or statements).

Use the following information to help you write your prompts:

  • You can only ask a question about one project or application at a time.
  • You can specify date ranges, such as 2025-10-1 to 2025-10-31.
    • If you don't specify a date range, the default date range is the previous 7 days.
    • Prompts for data from the previous week set the date range to the last Monday to Sunday period.
    • Prompts for data from the previous month set the date range to the last calendar month.
  • For applications, you must specify the application name in your prompt, even if you are viewing a page in Google Cloud console that is showing data for a selected application. The application name is the unique identifier for the application, such as web-store. If you use the display name for the application, such as "Web store", Gemini Cloud Assist might parse your prompt incorrectly.
  • Gemini Cloud Assist uses data from the App Optimize API for cost-related questions about utilization, the same API that provides data for the Cloud Hub Optimization page. Gemini Cloud Assist can answer general questions about utilization and performance using the Cloud Monitoring API.

The following table lists some example prompts.

Prompt Type of response
"How much did I spend on this project last month?" A summary of costs in the last calendar month for the selected project.
"How much did my GKE cluster my-cluster-id cost me last month?" A summary of costs for the cluster my-cluster-id in the last calendar month.
"Show me my costs in us-central1." A summary of resource costs in the selected project in the region us-central1 over the last 7 days.
"What were the least cost efficient resources last month for my app my-favourite-app?" A list of the least cost efficient resources in the application my-favourite-app in the last month.
"What are my most overprovisioned resources that are costing me the most?" A list of the most overprovisioned resources in the selected project in the last 7 days.

Disable the App Optimize API

If you no longer want to view data on the Optimization page, you can disable the API.

  1. In the Google Cloud console toolbar, select the project where you want to disable the API.

  2. Go to the App Optimize API dashboard.

  3. Click Disable.

  4. In the confirmation dialog, click Disable.

What's next