Paste a line item from your invoice and find what it bills for, across the Google Cloud services covered so far.
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 free 50 GiB per project each month, including 30 days of storage. Vended network logs bill at a lower rate with no free allotment. Retention beyond 30 days is billed separately; the _Required bucket is free.
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 logs and vended network logs (VPC Flow Logs, Firewall Rules Logging and Cloud NAT logs), which scale directly with traffic. Vended network logs get no free allotment.
- 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.
- Sinks that route the same entry to more than one log bucket: each bucket is charged for its own copy.
How to reduce it
Write exclusion filters
Exclusions drop logs before they reach a log bucket, so Logging does not bill them. Health checks and successful load-balancer requests are the usual first targets. Excluding VPC Flow Logs brings back their generation charge, so sample those at the source instead.
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.
Send compliance-only logs straight to Cloud Storage
Logging does not charge for routing. Logs that a sink sends to a Cloud Storage bucket and that the _Default sink excludes never pay the log bucket storage charge; you pay Cloud Storage rates instead. Colder classes have minimum storage durations, so match the class to how long you keep the logs.
Rates
Sources and review
- Explanation reviewed:
- 1 Nov 2026, against Google Cloud Observability pricing.
- Rates verified:
- not yet. No rate is shown on this page until one is loaded from the Cloud Billing Catalog API.
Now find out how much of this you are actually paying.
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