Tracking GCP Expenses with Looker

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​Controlling costs has become a challenge for companies as they move to the cloud. Whether you are a small or large business, everyone wants to save money. Teams are globally dispersed, projects are more specialized and changing initiatives contribute to complex cost reports. Beyond their intricacies, companies need to understand granting permissions to these reports and ensuring the correct teams have the right access in order to be successful. Business intelligence tools, like Looker, make the day to day management of these priorities easier.
    
Google Cloud Platform (GCP) has a vast amount of reporting capabilities, but introduces risk when different teams are accessing data in a production environment. In order to decouple  data, we need BI tools. Looker, a Google owned product, can plug directly into a customer’s billing data. They also have out of the box marketplace features, so there is no extra implementation beyond setting up a connection. 

Using Looker gives teams much greater agency, trading capital expenditure for reduced operational expenditure. The beauty of Looker is that it allows non-technical staff to run “queries” and drill down to the information they need with little to no SQL experience. Companies simply need an administrator for Looker to enable teams, freeing up engineers from simple queries and creating reports. 

Looker can also be used to create customizable dashboards that can be managed and shared by individuals, teams, or departments.  These dashboards allow users to drill down and explore beyond what is being displayed. For example, if a visualization only has December, you can drill down and change it to look at November instead. If you want it for later, save it as a Look and you will be able to plug it into any dashboard that you have access to!

Consolidation and flexibility is the name of the game in an ever changing world of technology. Looker allows all employees to pull the data relevant to them without needing a dedicated team in order to build functionality for them. Enabling businesses to work faster and with more information leads to quick, effective decision making, propelling you forward to solve tomorrow’s problems today. 

​Clay Hurford
LucidPoint Cloud Engineer