Google Cloud

Roiva writes these metric observations on each sync. Reference the key in a value formula to use this data in your ROI calculations.

Budgets and Spend

• Measure total monthly Google Cloud spend before and after an AI initiative
• Track GCP spend per initiative by giving each initiative its own Cloud Billing budget
• Isolate Vertex AI or Gemini API spend by limiting an initiative's budget to just those services

1. In Google Cloud: Open the Billing export page (console.cloud.google.com/billing/export), choose your billing account, and look at Standard usage cost on the BigQuery export tab. If it already names a project and dataset, the export is on and you can skip the next two steps
2. In Google Cloud: If it's off, enable it and pick the project and dataset to hold it. The project must be linked to this same billing account, so a project still in the free BigQuery Sandbox can't hold the export, and the dataset should have table expiration turned off. Enabling it needs the Billing Account Administrator or Billing Account Costs Manager role, plus BigQuery User on the project. A US or EU multi-region dataset also gets the previous month's costs
3. In Google Cloud: Give the export time to fill. Google creates the table shortly after the export is enabled, but cost data takes a few hours to start arriving and the previous month's backfill can take up to five days. You can keep going with the next steps meanwhile
4. In Roiva: Under Billing Export, enter the project and dataset the Billing export page shows, e.g. my-project.billing_export, and click Create Connection. Roiva finds the export table in that dataset (its full Table ID works too), creates a Google service account for this connection, and shows its email on the connection page
5. In Google Cloud: Grant that service account three read-only roles: Billing Account Viewer on the billing account, BigQuery Data Viewer on the export dataset, and BigQuery Job User on the dataset's project. The connection page lists the gcloud and bq commands, filled in, to paste into Cloud Shell or send to whoever administers your Google Cloud
6. Back in Roiva: The connection page checks each step as the service account and says what's still missing. Once it's all ticked, click Test Connection; your total Google Cloud spend syncs from there, with no budgets needed
7. In Google Cloud: To split spend by initiative (optional), create a budget for each one on the Budgets & alerts page (console.cloud.google.com/billing/budgets) whose name identifies it, e.g. roiva-invoice-ai, limited to the projects, services (such as Vertex AI or the Gemini API) or label that initiative uses. Creating budgets needs the Billing Account Administrator or Billing Account Costs Manager role
8. Back in Roiva: Link this connection to each initiative as a cost source and add a budget mapping with that initiative's budget name (or part of it)

• The Google Cloud steps usually need a billing account administrator and whoever owns the BigQuery project, who often aren't the person connecting Roiva — the connection page's commands are written to be sent to them as they are
• If the export's dataset was created while its project was in the BigQuery Sandbox, it keeps the Sandbox's 60-day table expiration after billing is linked — remove the dataset's default table expiration, or the export loses its older months
• Roiva holds no key or password for the service account and no Google sign-in, so nothing expires — access lasts until you remove its roles or delete the connection
• If your organization enforces domain-restricted sharing (the iam.allowedPolicyMemberDomains policy, on by default for Google Cloud organizations created since May 2024), Google refuses the grants until an admin allows Roiva's Google Workspace customer ID, shown on the connection page
• Billing export data reaches BigQuery within about a day, so the current month fills in nightly and last month keeps updating as late costs and credits arrive
• Each budget's spend follows its own scope in Google Cloud — its projects, folders, services, label and credit settings — grouped by invoice month and net of credits
• To attribute by label, limit the initiative's budget to that label in Google Cloud — a budget takes one label key/value pair
• Mappings match any part of a budget's name, case-insensitively, so give each initiative's budget a distinct name
• Roiva runs its queries in the export table's project, so their BigQuery cost bills there
• One connection reads one billing account's export; budgets on other billing accounts, and budgets limited to subaccounts, get no spend