GCP Professional Cloud Architect Practice Question

Your organization maintains a shared billing account for 60 Google Cloud projects that are tagged with the label environment:prod or environment:dev. The FinOps team has been asked to detect unexpected daily spikes in network egress charges without building any new data pipelines or writing SQL. They need an interactive, near-real-time chart that they can filter by project, label, and SKU directly in the Google Cloud console. Which built-in capability should they rely on first?

Use the Cloud Billing Reports page, switch the view to daily granularity, and apply project, label, and SKU filters to visualize egress cost trends.
Enable the Active Assist Committed Use Discount Recommender to surface network egress cost anomalies across projects.
Configure a Cloud Billing budget with a 10 percent threshold and rely on forecast-based email alerts to detect unexpected spend.
Set up automatic cost export to BigQuery and create a Looker Studio dashboard that groups costs by environment label.

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Answer Description

The Cloud Billing Reports page provides an interactive web UI inside the Google Cloud console that updates several times per day. It lets users switch the cost chart to daily granularity and apply filters or groupings such as project, service, SKU, and user-defined labels, making it ideal for quickly spotting cost spikes like unexpected network egress. Budgets and alerts can warn when spend exceeds a preset threshold, but they do not give an exploratory visualization of trends. Exporting data to BigQuery and building a Looker Studio dashboard would meet the analysis requirement but contradicts the mandate to avoid additional pipelines and SQL work. The Committed Use Discount Recommender focuses on identifying commitment opportunities for Compute Engine and similar resources, not on visualizing real-time spend fluctuations.

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