Billing actions

Prior reading: Manage organizations

Purpose: This document explains the various billing-related actions Org Admins can take in Workbench.

Note: This document is specific to Org Admins only.

Introduction

In Enterprise Tier accounts, Organization Admins are responsible for setting up billing in Workbench. They're also able to access logs that can help determine spend within their organization.

Create a pod

A pod is a way of organizing workspaces, people, and resources within an organization, so that they share the same cloud platform and billing. Each pod is linked to a cloud account, which is used for billing. One pod can be used for many workspaces. Since pods are linked to cloud accounts, the pod used determines which cloud platform the workspace belongs to.

Only Org Admins and Pod Managers can create pods in Enterprise Tier accounts. See Set up billing with pods in the Workbench UI for Google Cloud Platform-specific instructions.

Add users to a pod

Workbench users need to be a member of a pod to have access to billing resources. Org Admins grant users this access.

Billing best practices

Note that these best practices are specifically for Google Cloud Project-backed workspaces.

Group and filter spend

Org Admins can use GCP project-level labels to group and filter spend.

When Workbench creates a Google Cloud project for a workspace, three GCP labels are created:

• vwb_org_id for the organization UUID
• vwb_pod_id for the pod (billing project) UUID
• vwb_workspace_id for the workspace UUID

Since these are GCP project labels, they're exported to Cloud Billing and are visible to anyone with Billing Account Administrator (or Viewer) access in the Cloud Billing Console. They can also be found in BigQuery billing exports in the project.labels column. You can break down or group spend by organization, pod, or workspace.

Monitor usage metrics

Org Admins can query activity logs to find out usage metrics, such as number of users in an organization and the number of workspaces created by an organization's users.

They can also see more granular information. For example, Org Admins can see which files users are accessing in a workspace or what BigQuery queries are being run via the audit_log JSON object in the cloud_audit_logs_<org_id> table. See Organization activity log data reference for detailed dataset information.