BigQuery summary - google-cloud-platform

Question

Where/how can I easily see how many BigQuery analysis queries have been run per month. How about storage usage overall/changes-over-time(monthly)?
I've had a quick look at "Monitoring > Dashboards > Bigquery". Is that the best place to explore? It only seems to go back to early October - was that when it was released or does it only display the last X weeks of data? Trying metrics explorer for Queries Count (Metric:bigquery.googleapis.com/job/num_in_flight) was giving me a weird unlabelled y-axis, e.g. a scale of 0 to 0.08? Odd as I expect to see a few hundred queries run per week.
Context: It would be good to have a high level summary of BigQuery, as the the months progress, to give an idea to the wider organisation and management on the scale of usage.

Answer 1

You can track your bytes billed by exporting BigQuery usage logs.
Setup logs export (this is using the Legacy Logs Viewer)
Open Logging -> Logs Viewer
Click Create Sink
Enter "Sink Name"
For "Sink service" choose "BigQuery dataset"
Select your BigQuery dataset to monitor
Create sink
Create sink
Once Logs is enabled, all queries to be executed will store data usage logs in table "cloudaudit_googleapis_com_data_access_YYYYMMDD" under the BigQuery dataset you selected in your sink.
Created cloudaudit_googleapis_com_* tables
Here is a sample query to get bytes used per user
#standardSQL
WITH data as
(
SELECT
protopayload_auditlog.authenticationInfo.principalEmail as principalEmail,
protopayload_auditlog.metadataJson AS metadataJson,
CAST(JSON_EXTRACT_SCALAR(protopayload_auditlog.metadataJson,
"$.jobChange.job.jobStats.queryStats.totalBilledBytes") AS INT64) AS totalBilledBytes,
FROM
`myproject_id.training_big_query.cloudaudit_googleapis_com_data_access_*`
)
SELECT
principalEmail,
SUM(totalBilledBytes) AS billed_bytes
FROM
data
WHERE
JSON_EXTRACT_SCALAR(metadataJson, "$.jobChange.job.jobConfig.type") = "QUERY"
GROUP BY principalEmail
ORDER BY billed_bytes DESC
Query results
NOTES:
You can only track the usage starting at the date when you set up the logs export
Table "cloudaudit_googleapis_com_data_access_YYYYMMDD" is created daily to track all logs

Answer 2

I think Cloud Monitoring is the only place to create and view metrics. If you are not happy with what they provide for BigQuery by default, the only other alternative is to create your own customized carts and dashboards that satisfy your need. You can achieve that using Monitoring Query Language. Using MQL you can achieve the stuff you described in you question. Here are the links for more detailed information.
Introduction to BigQuery monitoring
Introduction to Monitoring Query Language