1. Scope the audit
Choose the accounts or projects to look at and a period, usually the last full month. Name one person per account who can say "yes, delete it" or "no, keep it". An audit without owners ends as a list nobody acts on.
2. Take an inventory
Export the cost report grouped by service and by label. The top five lines usually explain most of the bill. Note every resource that has no owner label: those are the first suspects, because nobody will defend them.
3. Look for idle resources
Check development and staging environments that run around the clock, machines with almost no CPU or network use over several weeks, and databases with no connections. A non-production environment that nobody uses at night or at weekends can usually be stopped on a schedule.
4. Look for oversized resources
Compare what each machine and database has with what it uses at its busiest. Your provider's own sizing recommendations give a starting list. Change one thing at a time, and keep a way back.
5. Look for orphans and old data
Search for disks attached to nothing, old snapshots and images, unused static IP addresses, idle load balancers and buckets without lifecycle rules. Logs kept forever at full detail belong here too.
6. Rank and decide
Put every finding in a table with the monthly cost, the effort and the risk. Do the large, low-risk items first, schedule the rest, and write down what you chose to keep and why, so the next audit does not start from zero.
Put a number on it
If you want a first idea of the size of the waste before you start, use the free 3C - Cloud Cost Calculator. It shows the default GCP, AWS or Azure price of your platform, what you could gain with LineXa Studio under assumptions you set yourself, and the difference between the two. It is an estimate, not a quote, but it tells you whether the audit is worth an afternoon.
On Google Cloud, steps 2 to 5 can be automated: reCloud takes the inventory with a read-only scan and lists the idle, oversized and orphaned resources, with their cost and how safe each is to delete.
Want it done for you, with the findings ranked and a plan? Book a Cloud Waste Audit and FinOps Consulting and we will run this audit on your accounts.