Cloud Logging Data Ingestion
A charge for the volume of logs written into Cloud Logging. It grows with traffic and with debug verbosity, and because nothing fails when it grows, it is one of the most reliably ignored lines on a Google Cloud bill.
Billed: Per gibibyte ingested into log buckets beyond a monthly free allotment. Retention beyond the default window is billed separately.
What triggers this charge
- Application logs at DEBUG or INFO level in production, which are typically an order of magnitude more voluminous than WARN.
- Load balancer and VPC flow logs, which scale directly with traffic.
- Data-access audit logs, which are off by default for good reason and enormous when enabled broadly.
- Kubernetes cluster logging capturing every container's stdout, including chatty sidecars.
How to reduce it
Write exclusion filters
Exclusions drop logs before ingestion, so they are not billed at all. Health checks and successful load-balancer requests are the usual first targets.
Sample high-volume, low-value logs
VPC flow logs support sampling. A 10% sample usually answers the same questions at a tenth of the volume.
Route archives to Cloud Storage
For logs kept only for compliance, a sink to Coldline storage costs a small fraction of retention in a log bucket.
Rates
Now find out how much of this you are actually paying.
Finitizer breaks your Google Cloud bill down to the SKU, shows how each one has moved since last week, and separates rate changes from usage changes — so you know whether to talk to engineering or to procurement.