Where are my "storage PD capacity" charges coming from?

Question

I'm new to google cloud. I'm managing several users who are testing it out and I run the lab so have to figure out what it's costing us.

I'm trying to understand where the charges come from. Here's current charge estimate:

The bit that confuses me is the "Storage PD capacity" part. I get that this is 'Persistent Disk Storage' but I cannot see which VMs it is associated with. From the charge breakdown I can see that there is 481GB that we are being charged for. But here is the disk space associated with current compute engine instances:

So there is only one instance that has a disk allocated which even could contain 481 GB. But if I ssh into that and check how much disc space is used with df -h then it shows only 38 GB is being used:

So where is the 481 GB coming from? How do I figure this out?

Many thanks for your answers!

Answer 1

The Storage PD capacity is the cost of Persistent disk, attached or not to a VM. It's space reserved for you and thus you need to pay for it, even if you store nothing in it.

Now, why 481? Firstly, London is Europe-west2 region. If you take all the disk in this region, the total is 500 + 100 + 10 = 610Gb.

Your billing report ends on the 25, if you take 610Gb over only 25 days, you get 491Gb (610/31*25), roughly what you see (depend on exactly when the billing has been figured out)

Answer 2

An explanation might be that you are using persistent disks, as they

are located independently from your virtual machine

as oposed to Local SSD, which

are physically attached to the server that hosts your VM instance

I believe you have the Local SSD option in mind, so have a look at the configurations of your project to figure out which one it is.