FAQ

Is there a delay for your extension to trigger?

The short answer is that there could be. This extension, and pretty much any approach using Cloud Billing, is at the mercy of Google Cloud. If there is a delay in Google Cloud calculating billing, then naturally this will mean the extension will trigger later than what is ideal. However, in my experience, this has not been a big issue.

An excerpt from the Firebase documentation around this:

Depending on the Google Cloud or Firebase service, sometimes there's a slight delay (up to a few days) in usage reporting to Cloud Billing. This reporting delay impacts the calculated spend during the budget period and can cause a delay in the generation of budget alert notifications.

What do I do once the extension is triggered?

When the extension is triggered, it will stop services in your Firebase project based on the "strategy" you select. To recover services, see the detailed guide over on the Recovery page.

Why am I getting logs from this extension?

Logs are generated when the extension receives alert from Google Cloud Billing via Budgets. At the time of writing, for any alert generated it will be logged by the extension.

Alerts are also generated periodically by GCP, even if a threshold hasn't been met. This is OK behaviour as this extension only responds to configured thresholds being met or exceeded.

Excerpt below from the GCP documentation:

• Budget notifications are sent to the Pub/Sub topic multiple times per day with the current status of your budget. This is a different cadence than the budget alert emails, which are only sent when a budget threshold is met.

• Pub/Sub notifications are sent even if the Cloud Billing account has no usage.

• Pub/Sub only guarantees at-least-once delivery. You might receive a message multiple times, and messages might arrive out of order.

We do not expect high volumes of logs. However you can filter these out in your log queries.

What stop strategy do you recommend?

Strategies are outlined in this guide. However, the recommended approach is Strategy 1 (removal of Billing Account from your project) due to it's simplicity.

What can I do if I find an issue or have questions?

Feel free to raise an issue or questions in the GitHub repository. It is an open source extension, and you are more than welcome to submit pull requests / code changes.

We periodically update the extension to be up-to-date with Firebase, and in conjunction with user feedback. We also update this guide. So any requests, issues, or questions are welcome.