GCP

This page documents GCP-specific details for the Discover Assets feature.

Prerequisites

• Your GCP account must be added to MechCloud using Workload Identity Federation. Follow the GCP onboarding guide to connect your account.

• The service account must have Compute Viewer (roles/compute.viewer) and Cloud Asset Viewer (roles/cloudasset.viewer) roles on the project.

How Discovery Works

When you run Discover Assets against a GCP account MechCloud queries the GCP APIs to enumerate resources across the selected regions and zones. The results are rendered in a hierarchical view that reflects GCP's resource organization:

• Regions - top-level grouping (e.g. us-central1, europe-west1)

• Zones - within each region (e.g. us-central1-a, us-central1-b)

• Regional resources - resources scoped to a region such as static external IPs and subnets

• Zonal resources - resources scoped to a zone such as VM instances and persistent disks

VPCs and subnets are displayed with their contained resources so you can see which VMs sit inside which subnet and which disks are attached to which VM.

Resource Cards

Each discovered resource is displayed as a card with key attributes:

VM Instances

• Machine type (e.g. e2-medium, n2-standard-4)

• Internal and external IP addresses

• Attached disks

• Current state (running, stopped, terminated)

Persistent Disks

• Disk type (e.g. pd-standard, pd-ssd, pd-balanced)

• Size in GB

• Attached instance (if any)

Static External IPs

• IP address

• Associated resource (if any)

• Status (in use or reserved)

Lifecycle Operations

The following operations are available directly from the discovery view:

Operation	Scope	Description
Start	VM	Start a stopped VM instance
Stop	VM	Stop a running VM instance
Reboot	VM	Restart a running VM instance
Delete	VM, Disk, IP, VPC, Subnet	Remove the resource

All operations are available at the individual resource level and in bulk.

Cascading Deletes: When deleting a VPC or subnet MechCloud automatically identifies and removes dependent resources (VMs, disks, firewall rules etc.) in the correct order. No manual cleanup is required.

Identifying Waste

Use Discover Assets to spot resources that are incurring cost without providing value:

• Unattached persistent disks - disks not attached to any VM continue to incur storage charges

• Unused static IPs - reserved external IPs not associated with any resource are billed by GCP

• Stopped instances with attached disks - the VM itself does not incur compute charges when stopped but attached disks continue to be billed

These resources can be deleted directly from the discovery UI with a single click.

Demo