Optimize your cloud costs using Cloud Hub Optimization and Cost Explorer

Application owners are looking for three things when they think about optimizing cloud costs:

1. What are the most expensive resources?

2. Which resources are costing me more this week or month?

3. Which resources are poorly utilized?

To help you answer these questions quickly and easily, we announced Cloud Hub Optimization and Cost Explorer, in private preview, at Google Cloud Next 2025. And today, we are excited to announce that both Cloud Hub Optimization and Cost Explorer are now in public preview.

Application cost and utilization

As an app owner, your primary objective is keeping your application healthy at all times. Yet, monitoring all the individual components of your application, which may straddle dozens of Projects, can be quite overwhelming. AppHub Applications allow you to reorganize cloud around your application, giving you the information and controls you need at your fingertips.

In addition to supporting Google Cloud Projects, Cloud Hub Optimization and Cost Explorer leverage App Hub applications to show you the cost-efficiency of your application’s workloads and services instantly. This is great for instance when you are trying to pinpoint deployments running on GKE clusters that might be wasting valuable resources, such as GPUs.

Not just another cost dashboard

When you bring up Cloud Hub Optimization, you can immediately see the resources that are costing you the most, along with the percentage change in their cost. With this highly granular cost information, you can now attribute your costs to specific resources and resource owners to reason about any changes in costs.

We have additionally integrated granular cost data from Cloud Billing and resource utilization data from Cloud Monitoring to give you a comprehensive picture of your cost efficiency. This includes average vCPU utilization for your Project, which helps you find the most promising optimization candidates across hundreds of Google Cloud Projects.

The Cost Explorer dashboard also shows you your costs logically organized at the product level, for even more cost explainability. Instead of seeing a lump sum cost for Compute Engine, you can now see your exact spend on individual products including Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) clusters, Persistent Disks, Cloud Load Balancing, and more.

Simple is powerful

Customers who have tried these new tools love the information that is surfaced as well as the simplicity of the interfaces.

“My team has to keep an eye on cloud costs across tens of business units and hundreds of developers. The Cloud Hub Optimization and Cost Explorer dashboards are a force multiplier for my team as they tell us where to look for cost savings and potential optimization opportunities.” – Frank Dice, Principal Cloud Architect, Major League Baseball

Customers especially appreciate the breadth of product coverage available out of the box without any additional setup, and the fact that there is no additional charge to using these features.

What’s next

As your organization “shifts left” on cloud cost management, we are working to help application owners and developers understand and optimize their cloud costs. You can try Cloud Hub Optimize and Cost Explorer here.

You can also see a live demo of how Cloud Hub Optimization and Cost Explorer can be used to identify underutilized GKE clusters within seconds in the Google Cloud Next 2025 talk Maximize Your Cloud ROI.

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