Managing APIs

The Google Cloud Console offers a reasonably detailed dashboard for controlling API access and monitoring usage. To view the dashboard, go to Navigation menu | APIs & Services | Dashboard. From here, users can view time-series metrics for traffic, errors, and latency, as well as a breakdown of API usage by service. This is a good way to get an overall feel of the activity of your project across the various GCP services. Clicking on any service API here will allow you to dive into more detail about that specific service, including a per-account and per-endpoint view of usage.

In addition, you can use this dashboard to view and modify API quotas. By default, most of these quotas are set to the maximum allowable amount, though in some cases, Google can increase these quotas on request. Setting quotas can be a good first step in ensuring that your project does not exceed API usage for specific activities.

By default, some APIs are disabled for your Google Cloud project. A disabled API will not be accessible and will therefore not incur any charges. In these cases, you will often see a notification that the API is disabled along with an option to enable it. To enable APIs, it is often useful to use the Google Cloud API Library, available at Navigation menu | APIs & Services | Library. From here, you can search for APIs and view related documentation.

Once you locate the API you would like to use, click on Enable to allow billing for that API. Some APIs will require agreeing to additional terms and conditions. Enabling and disabling APIs requires Billing User IAM rights, and it is usually controlled by project administrators.

You may be surprised at the sheer number of APIs available from the API Library; the API Library is a centralized repository for virtually all Google Developer APIs. This makes the API Library a good place to discover other products and services you can incorporate into your project.