This article walks through several steps to resolve issues encountered by researchers who are trying to link GCP billing accounts to their workspaces. While this isn’t an exhaustive set of solutions for users, we find that these collectively resolve most problems. We recommend going through this article starting from the top because more common issues are listed first.
Are you the original creator of the workspace?
You must be the original creator of a workspace in order to update its associated billing information. If you’re an owner, but not the original creator, you’ll get the following error when attempting to edit the workspace billing information and saving the workspace.
We hope to make this more clear within the Workbench itself in the near future when editing workspaces to avoid any confusion. A workaround here is to duplicate the workspace, which will then make you the owner of the new duplicated workspace.
Are GCP billing account permissions correct?
In order to successfully find and link a GCP billing account to an All of Us workspace, your @researchallofus.org account and terra-billing@terra.bio (may show up as terra-billing@firecloud.org) must be added as billing account users as described here. These email addresses must be added by a billing account administrator, which could be you or someone else depending on how the billing account is managed. If these permissions aren’t correct you either won’t be able to find the billing account in the drop-down menu or the workspace won’t be successfully created or edited.
If you’re an account administrator or viewer, please go to the Google cloud console and select “Account Management” to check whether these emails are listed as billing account viewers:
If you don’t have the ability to view the billing information please contact an administrator to have them check and, if necessary, add these emails.
Is the billing account linked to several other projects?
GCP billing accounts can be linked to a specific amount of maximum projects (typically 5 by default); these are account quotas and are used by GCP to improve security and service. In this case, a project could be many things, including other All of Us workspaces. If your billing account is already linked to the maximum number of projects then you’ll be unable to successfully link it to an All of Us workspace. This will result in an error when trying to create or edit a workspace using the GCP billing account.
You can view how many projects are associated with your billing account by going to the “Account Management” section of the GCP billing console.
If you have reached your limit, you can either remove some billing projects associated with the account or request a quota increase. You’ll have to either be an administrator of the account or have a designated administrator request the increase. Once complete and your project number is lower than your quota, you will be able to successfully link the account to another workspace.
Contact us if you are still having issues
Please contact support@researchallofus.org if you’ve attempted all the solutions and are still having issues linking the billing account to your workspace(s). Additionally, you may want to examine some GCP billing support resources.