Get bucket size

Concepts

This page shows you how to get the size of your Cloud Storage buckets.

Required roles

In order to get the required permissions for getting the size of a Cloud Storage bucket, ask your administrator to grant you the Storage Object Viewer (roles/storage.objectViewer) role on the bucket. If you plan on using the Google Cloud console, ask your administrator to grant you the Monitoring Viewer (roles/monitoring.viewer) role on the project that contains the bucket instead.

These roles contain the permissions required to get the size of a bucket. To see the exact permissions that are required, expand the Required permissions section:

Required permissions

• storage.objects.list
  • This permission is only required for using the Google Cloud CLI to perform the instructions on this page.

To see the permissions associated with roles/monitoring.viewer, refer to the Monitoring Viewer documentation.

You might be able to get the required permissions with other predefined roles or custom roles. For instructions on granting roles on buckets, see Use IAM with buckets. For instructions on granting roles on projects, see Manage access to projects.

Determine a bucket's size

Console

Note: Monitoring measures bucket size once a day and does not report empty buckets. To measure bucket size at a given moment for any bucket, use gcloud storage instead.

To view the metrics for a monitored resource by using the Metrics Explorer, do the following:

1. In the navigation panel of the Google Cloud console, select Monitoring, and then select  Metrics explorer:

   Go to Metrics explorer

2. In the Metric element, expand the Select a metric menu, enter Total bytes in the filter bar, and then use the submenus to select a specific resource type and metric:
   1. In the Active resources menu, select GCS Bucket.
   2. In the Active metric categories menu, select Storage.
   3. In the Active metrics menu, select Total bytes.
   4. Click Apply.
   The fully qualified name for this metric is storage.googleapis.com/storage/total_bytes.

3. To remove time series from the display, use the Filter element.

4. To combine time series, use the menus on the Aggregation element. For example, to display the CPU utilization for your VMs, based on their zone, set the first menu to Mean and the second menu to zone.

   All time series are displayed when the first menu of the Aggregation element is set to Unaggregated. The default settings for the Aggregation element are determined by the metric type you selected.

5. For quota and other metrics that report one sample per day, do the following:
   1. In the Display pane, set the Widget type to Stacked bar chart.
   2. Set the time period to at least one week.

You can also use the Metrics Explorer to measure other bucket metrics such as storage.googleapis.com/storage/object_count and storage.googleapis.com/storage/total_byte_seconds, which measure the daily number of objects and the daily storage consumed, respectively. See the Google Cloud metrics documentation for a complete list of available metrics and Metrics, time series, and resources for more information about using the Metrics Explorer.

Command line

Caution: The gcloud storage du command calculates the current space usage by making a series of object listing requests, which can take a long time for large buckets. If the number of objects in your bucket is hundreds of thousands or more, or if you want to monitor your bucket size over time, use Monitoring instead, as described in the Console tab.

Use the gcloud storage du command with a --summarize flag:

gcloud storage du gs://BUCKET_NAME --summarize

where BUCKET_NAME is the name of the relevant bucket.

The response looks like the following example:

134620      gs://my-bucket

In this example, the size of the bucket named my-bucket is 134,620 bytes.

What's next

• List the objects in your bucket.
• Get object metadata.
• Learn more about monitoring your resources in Monitoring.

Try it for yourself

If you're new to Google Cloud, create an account to evaluate how Cloud Storage performs in real-world scenarios. New customers also get $300 in free credits to run, test, and deploy workloads.

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