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Managing GCP Costs

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Anna edited this page Jun 25, 2026 · 1 revision

Managing GCP Costs

Most Aura Tracker GCP tools make read-only list API calls that are free or have a generous free tier. A small number of tools call APIs that have per-use pricing above the free tier.

Which Modules Call Paid APIs

Module API Pricing note
monitoring Cloud Monitoring — timeseries.list First 150 MiB/month free; $0.01–$0.18/MiB after
aura Cloud Monitoring (same as above) Each gcp_get_aura_score call fetches several metric time-series
archgraph Cloud Monitoring + Cloud Trace reads Large projects with many services may read significant metric volume
coverage Cloud Monitoring + Cloud Trace + Cloud Logging reads Coverage analysis reads signals for every compute node
aura (with Recommender) Cloud Recommender API Charged per recommendations.list call when RECOMMENDER_ENABLED=true; see Recommender pricing
Anonymization (DLP mode) Cloud DLP Charged per content item when ANONYMIZE_ENABLED=true and mode: dlp; local mode is free

All other modules (GKE, Cloud Run, Pub/Sub, IAM, Storage, Cloud SQL, Networking, etc.) call list/get APIs that are either free or counted against free tiers you are unlikely to exhaust through conversational use.

Control Costs with --modules

The simplest cost control is loading only the modules you need:

# No monitoring reads — zero variable cost
GCP_PROJECT_ID=my-project ./aura-tracker-gcp \
  --modules cloudrun,gke,pubsub,iam,storage

# Monitoring enabled but no Aura (no automated metric fan-out)
GCP_PROJECT_ID=my-project ./aura-tracker-gcp \
  --modules cloudrun,monitoring

# Full feature set (default) — monitor Cloud Monitoring costs if scanning large projects
GCP_PROJECT_ID=my-project ./aura-tracker-gcp

Control Costs with Environment Variables

# Disable Cloud Recommender calls inside Aura Score
RECOMMENDER_ENABLED=false GCP_PROJECT_ID=my-project ./aura-tracker-gcp

# Use local-mode anonymization (free) instead of DLP
ANONYMIZE_ENABLED=true ANONYMIZE_CONFIG_PATH=anonymize.yaml GCP_PROJECT_ID=my-project ./aura-tracker-gcp
# (in anonymize.yaml: mode: local)

Recommended GCP Billing Alerts

Set these up in the GCP Console under Billing → Budgets & Alerts:

Alert Suggested threshold Why
Monthly project budget 110% of your normal spend Catch unexpected increases early
Cloud Monitoring $5/month Most conversational usage stays well below this
Cloud Recommender $10/month Aura Score with Recommender enabled makes frequent calls on large projects
Cloud DLP $1/month DLP mode anonymization charges per content item 
# Quick budget creation via gcloud (adjust amounts to your project)
gcloud billing budgets create \
  --billing-account=BILLING_ACCOUNT_ID \
  --display-name="Aura Tracker GCP - Monitoring" \
  --budget-amount=5USD \
  --threshold-rule=percent=100 \
  --filter-services=services/95FF-2EF5-5EA1  # Cloud Monitoring

Cost Estimation for Large Projects

For a project with ~50 Cloud Run services running gcp_project_aura_summary once:

  • Metrics fetched: ~4 time-series per service × 50 services = ~200 time-series
  • Estimated data read: < 1 MiB (well within the 150 MiB free tier)
  • Estimated cost: $0 for occasional use

For continuous automated scanning (e.g. running Aura Score every 5 minutes), costs may exceed the free tier. The 5-minute in-process cache means repeated calls within the cache window are free.

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