Connect to BigQuery

Connect your BigQuery project to Quper to track query costs and slot consumption.

Quper connects to BigQuery via a Service Account and tracks query costs, slot consumption, dataset storage, and spend by project, user, and dataset — giving data teams clear visibility into what is driving their BigQuery bill.

What Quper tracks from BigQuery

• On-demand query costs by project, dataset, table, and user
• Slot consumption for flat-rate and reservation-based workloads
• Storage costs for active and long-term storage by dataset
• Query-level cost attribution — bytes processed, slot hours, and estimated cost per query
• Spend trends and anomalies in real time

Before you begin

• You must have Project Owner or BigQuery Admin access in the GCP project you want to connect
• Quper supports connecting multiple GCP projects — repeat this process for each project, or connect at the billing account level via the GCP integration to cover all projects automatically

Connection steps

1

Go to Settings → Integrations

In your Quper workspace, navigate to Settings → Integrations and click Add Integration → BigQuery.

2

Create a Service Account

In the Google Cloud Console, go to IAM & Admin → Service Accounts in your BigQuery project and create a new service account:

• Name: quper-bigquery-reader
• Description: Quper BigQuery read-only access

3

Grant the required roles

Grant the service account the following roles on the project:

Role	Why it's needed
BigQuery Data Viewer	Read dataset, table, and job metadata
BigQuery Job User	Run INFORMATION_SCHEMA queries to pull usage data
BigQuery Resource Viewer	Read reservation and slot assignment data

4

Download the service account key

On the service account details page, go to Keys → Add Key → Create new key → JSON. Download the key file.

5

Upload the key to Quper

Back in Quper, upload the JSON key file and enter your GCP Project ID. Click Connect.

Quper verifies the service account permissions and begins ingesting BigQuery cost and usage data.

How Quper calculates query costs

For on-demand pricing, Quper calculates query cost using the bytes processed by each job and GCP's published on-demand rate for your region.

For flat-rate and reservation pricing, Quper tracks slot-hour consumption per project and reservation, and maps it to your committed slot spend to show effective cost per query.

Enabling INFORMATION_SCHEMA access

Quper uses BigQuery INFORMATION_SCHEMA.JOBS to pull per-query usage data. This view is available by default in all GCP projects. No additional setup is required.

INFORMATION_SCHEMA job data is available for queries run in the last 180 days. Quper will backfill up to 90 days of data on initial connection.

Troubleshooting

"Access denied" on INFORMATION_SCHEMA queries Ensure the service account has BigQuery Job User at the project level. The BigQuery Data Viewer role alone is not sufficient to run INFORMATION_SCHEMA queries.

Storage costs not appearing Confirm the service account has BigQuery Data Viewer at the project level. Dataset-level permissions are not sufficient for Quper to enumerate all datasets.