GCP – Announcing the General Availability of Smarter, AI-powered Cost Anomaly Detection
Last year, we announced the public preview of Cost Anomaly Detection, an AI-powered product designed to eliminate one of the biggest anxieties of using the Cloud: unexpected costs. The goal was to provide a safety net that automatically identifies unusual spikes in spending, helping you catch issues before they become financial problems.
Today, we are excited to announce that Cost Anomaly Detection is now generally available (GA), and it is more proactive, intelligent, and flexible. Best of all, anomaly alerts are now on by default for every customer across all projects, including the new ones, offering complete protection from day one.
What’s new in general availability?
For the GA release, we focused on making the service smarter, more automatic, more proactive, and more customizable to suit your specific needs. Here’s what’s new:
1. Auto-alerts by default
Insights into any deviations in your cloud costs should be the default. Protection from cost overruns should be constant and not require any configuration from your end. That’s why we’ve automatically enabled anomaly alerts for all customers on all their projects. Default alerts will be sent to Billing Administrators; you can, of course, easily visit the billing console to manage and customize your alert preferences at any time. The alerts will take you to the Anomaly dashboard on the billing console, where you can easily see all the details related to the cost spike including the root causes.
Anomaly Dashboard with Root Cause Analysis
Default alert configuration
2. Intelligent, AI-generated thresholds
Will auto-alerts mean more noise and email spam? No. Our improved algorithm now provides automated, AI-generated anomaly thresholds based on your historical spending patterns. This intelligent baseline ensures you are only alerted to spikes that seem significant and unexpected, relative to your spend behavior.
Default threshold configuration
And while the AI-generated thresholds work out of the box, you still have the flexibility to override them with your own custom values, if needed. Customers who have already configured their own custom values but would like to leverage our AI-generated thresholds, can easily do so from the billing console at any time.
3. More flexible filtering with percentage deviation
We heard your feedback that every project has a different sensitivity to cost spikes. A $100 deviation might be critical for a small project but expected noise for a large one. To address this, we’ve introduced an additional threshold for percentage deviation that filters your anomaly dashboard and alerts not only on an absolute dollar value but also on a percentage change. This allows your alerts to stay relevant to your budget and scale.
Custom threshold configuration
Don’t worry — all anomalies are still captured and can be viewed at any time by simply removing the filters from your dashboard.
4. Immediate protection from day one
During the public preview, we offered anomaly detection only on projects that were at least 6 months old due to lack of significant spend history. However, our improved algorithm now solves this “cold start” problem, making it possible to alert on anomalies even for new accounts and projects with no prior spend history. This helps ensure that you are protected on Google Cloud, from the get go.
Get started today
Cost Anomaly Detection is a core part of our FinOps capabilities that provides you with complete and predictable control over your cloud costs. When layered with Cloud Budgets, it creates a robust cost control strategy that works to prevent, detect, and contain runaway spend. And it remains free, offered as part of our comprehensive set of cost management tools.
Head over to your billing console to access this product and refer to our documentation for more details.
Read More for the details.
