Cloud usage monitoring and analysis has served an important role in helping users optimize their cloud services. However, many users have expressed a need to access more granular information about their Google Compute Engine usage. Today, we are making this possible with Compute Engine Usage Export, which enables you to easily export detailed reports about your usage data Usage Export makes it easy to obtain more granular insight into your Compute Engine usage at a resource level. For example, you can monitor exactly how long a virtual machine has been running or how much storage space a persistent disk uses on a daily basis.



Similar to Billing Export, Compute Engine Usage Export allows you to export a CSV file with the detailed usage data to a Google Cloud Storage bucket you specify. This CSV file can then be accessed through the Cloud Storage API, CLI tool, or Console.



The Usage Export feature will provide both daily reports that include usage data from the latest 24 hour period and monthly rollup reports that include monthly usage data up to the most current day.



This feature complements Billing Export to provide you with basic tools for monitoring, analyzing, and optimizing cost. You can link items between the two exports to easily identify charges for a particular resource.



Compute Engine Usage Export can be enabled from the Console as shown below.



The CSV files will be placed in a Cloud Storage bucket as shown in the Cloud Console example below. In this example, you can see one monthly rollup and three daily reports for May 2014.



The CSV file will contain line items for each resource during the time frame covered. In this example, you can see line items representing two different instances that have both run for the entire day in a daily report for May 1, 2014.



Report Date,MeasurementId,Quantity,Unit,Resource URI,ResourceId,Location
2014-05-01,com.google.cloud/services/compute-engine/VmimageN1Standard_1,86400,seconds,https://www.googleapis.com/compute/v1/projects/123456789/zones/us-central1-a/instances/testinstance1,13495613777116200000,us-central1-a
2014-05-01,com.google.cloud/services/compute-engine/VmimageN1Standard_1,86400,seconds,https://www.googleapis.com/compute/v1/projects/123456789/zones/us-central1-b/instances/testinstance2,17932867728944100000,us-central1-b


For those of you who’d like to see your usage data for May, we will automatically generate your full monthly usage report for May 2014 in the Cloud Storage bucket you have specified if you enable Compute Engine Usage Export by June 9, 2014.



To find out more about how to use the Compute Engine Usage Export, please check out the Usage Export documentation.



-Posted by Ken Sim, Product Manager