Google App Engine Billing inconsistent with Usage History - google-app-engine

I am sorry if this is not the right place to ask this question, but Google has moved customer support for Bronze Tier to Community Forum aka Stackoverflow... So here I am, stuck with a bill that I can't figure out. Just to give you the context, I am running an Android app sending videos averaging 2 megabytes per video to users. There are around 70 daily users downloading 2 videos a day.
Image here: http://postimg.org/image/cytlw3rzx/ (Sorry I don't have 10 reputation yet)
As you can see, there are supposedly 516 Gibibyte of Cloud Storage Download APAC. However, I only have around 150 megabytes of data stored on the cloud. So it is mathematically impossible to have such traffic over this period of time. On top of this, here is the Usage History which suggests totally different usage.
Image here: http://postimg.org/image/5h1tzl49f/
Please help if you have any idea what is going on as I am stuck with no customer support and no helpful information on the internet...

The usage history you posted (your second picture) is only for the App Engine application, but does not include Cloud Storage usage. It also does not include any usage you may make of Compute Engine, Big Query etc.
That is why the usage history shows less than 1$ per day whereas your final bill shows additional charges for Cloud Storage.
You can ask billing-related questions to the Cloud Platform billing team here : https://support.google.com/code/contact/cloud_platform_billing
You can also find more info on your current usage here :
https://console.developers.google.com/project/YOUR_PROJECT_ID/billing/unbilledinvoice
If you have doubted about how your cloud storage buckets are used, set up access logging as explained here.

Related

Resource usage increases abnormally in Google App Engine

I am using GAE for my product development. Now it is MVP version and in development phase. So the user traffic is still small.
But today (14:00 27th Feb 2017 UTC+7) when I saw the statistics I cannot believe my eyes. So huge numbers of requests and bandwidth. I am attaching here:
Abnormal resource usage
My request log and the App Engine Dashboard show the same traffic as usual (very small). So I think the Resource usage numbers is not correct.
Dashboard and Request log
Please explain me where the huge number of requests come from?
Here is the answer I got from Google Cloud Support. I am sharing below, in case someone get the same problem as I had:
The number of requests you see on your App Engine Dashboard is not 100% reliable as it sometimes reflect the only the projected usage not the exact usage. Your exact bill will only be reflected on your transaction history and it takes 24-48 hours for it to refresh to be able to display your usage for February 27, 2017. We can wait for 24-48 hours to validate that your transaction history will be the one to show your charges and usage.
And here is the final resource usage statistics

Find the total instance hours in my Google Apps Engine

Where can I find the total front-end instance hours that I have used in my previous days? It seems I can only see today's total.
AFAIK the actual instance-hours numbers are not directly available, at least not in the developer console.
What you might find helpful would be the historical graph of the instance usage, for the last (up to) 30 days, which you'll find in the Dashboard after selecting the Instances display mode, the desired timescale and the billed instance estimate graph:
Hover the mouse cursor over the graph and the actual billed instance estimate value will be displayed below the graph and the corresponding date and time is displayed in the top right corner. Note that there is some noticeable delay in updating the values, tho.
The graph detail level depends on the selected timescale, the coarsest being ~2h (on the 30 days timescale), so if you need more than just a general idea about usage trending you'd need to take care of:
averaging and/or integrating on a daily basis
accounting for the free daily quotas
accounting for instance class (I'm unsure if that's already taken into account or not)
You could also try the billing date export feature. From
Export billing data to a file:
You can export your daily usage and cost estimates automatically to a
CSV or JSON file stored in a Google Cloud Storage bucket you
specify. You can then access the data via the Cloud Storage API, CLI
tool, or Google Cloud Platform console
...
Alternatively, you can export detailed data to a Google BigQuery
dataset. For more information, see Export billing data to
BigQuery.
Note: I haven't actually tried this export feature. so I can't tell if the instance hours values are in there. There's also the still open GAE issue 10716 which suggests GAE stats might not be included.

GAE Channel API - Channels Created Cost

I have a paid app and can see the quota is 90,040 per day for channels created.
I have looked at all the pricing pages from cloud services and developer pricing pages and can not see any prices regarding the cost per channel created after the 100 free limit.
https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/quotas#Channel this page only says the daily limit is "Based on your budget" but I do not see any costs anywhere on the web.
Am I to assume that I get 90,040 free per day for having a paid app
As I understand the pricing changed recently and that's why the documentation is a little confusing. It used to be that you paid a tiny amount for each channel (something like 0.0001 - don't remember how many zeroes).
Now this tiny charge is canceled. You are just paying for CPU & bandwidth that your channels are using. That's why it says according to budget.
It's the same story with Email, and various other APIs as mentioned here: https://cloud.google.com/appengine/pricing. I'm fairly sure Channel API should be included in the last row in the resource billing table.
It costs 10,000 micropennies to create a channel (or 100 channels per 1 cent, see appstats for more).
See a more detailed answer to the same question here: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/google-appengine/uQFWM6F--hY

App Engine server + Android multiplayer game

Greetings,
I'm creating a multi-player android game and thought it would be a interesting idea to have App Engine handle the server work.
The game consists of 4 players, each phone requests an update every 0.5 seconds.
These requests are very simple and lightweight so i shouldn't be over reaching any free quotas.
The problem i found was that App Engine only handles 500 requests per second, i would only be able to
have around 60 game sessions active before App Engine will start ignoring new requests?
"App Engine's quota system allows for efficient applications with billing enabled to scale to around 500 queries per second (qps) or more than 40 million queries per day."
Or should i just not use this platform because it is not made for this kind of usage?
I sent this same question to the discussion groups on google but after 4 hours it hasn't been posted, there was no response on whether it was a bad question or anything. Hopefully someone here can give me some advice.
Thank you kindly, i'm looking forward to an answer and or advice.
Greetings,
Rohan C
That's an interesting question, considering the only page where I can find that quote contains the answer in the same paragraph.
http://code.google.com/support/bin/request.py?contact_type=AppEngineCPURequest
App Engine's quota system allows for
efficient applications with billing
enabled to scale to around 500 queries
per second (qps) or more than 40
million queries per day. This is a
substantial amount of traffic and
should easily suffice for even the
heaviest of Slashdottings. But if you
expect your application will need to
handle even higher qps, please
complete this form so we can assist
you.

how is Billing for Channel API done?

I've chosen google-app-engine because of its scalability, and now I try to understand how much I will have to pay once I release the product.
I've looked back and forth in the google app engine documentation to find an answer for question and couldn't find. I found few details in the "Quotas" page, I found how much I can get for free and how much is the Billing Default Quota.
In Billing Page there are number for CPU, etc with Resource and Unit and how much it cost. But no where could I find how much will it cost me per channel calls/created, etc.
I can't even try to make calculations with what's in the Admin console, because the current numbers there now are 0 (since there are 2 users which are the programmers).
How can I be ready for the releasing of the product that (hopefully) will have a huge number of channels created daily?
Is there a page I missed, or is there a tool for calculating?
Thanks!
EDIT:
Moishe, thanks for the quick and readable answer. So here are some more questions:
1. Do you think - if needed - that I will be able to get even more quota for the number of channels? I saw there's a special form to ask for more quotas, but I'm not sure that includes the Channel-API feature...
2. Are there any posts you've made for "how to use channel-API efficiently"? I saw some stuff about reusing the tokens per user. Is there more?
Thanks again.
Creating a channel costs about 2.7 CPU-seconds. A CPU-hour costs $0.10. So, each channel created costs
(2.7 / 3 600) * $0.10 = $7.5 × 10^-5
So creating 1000 channels will cost $0.075, or 7.5 cents.
You'll also get charged the normal outgoing bandwidth costs for any data sent over a channel.
The CPU cost probably isn't the biggest concern; you're more likely to run into quota caps then running out of money. Paid apps are limited to 86400 channel creations/day (1/second).

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