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This page guides you through understanding, configuring, and managing your Essential Contacts for critical Google Cloud notifications from your projects, folders, and organization resources.
Essential Contacts is a Google Cloud feature that lets you define and manage who receives important notifications related to the following categories:
By default, Identity and Access Management (IAM) roles manage permissions and access controls for Google Cloud resources. However, individuals assigned to these roles might not always be the best contacts for all operational notifications, especially when organizations have specialized teams for areas such as billing, legal, or security. Additionally, due to personnel and role changes, relying solely on default IAM principals for all notifications can lead to the overlook of crucial alerts about your projects or folders.
Essential Contacts lets you designate custom individuals or teams as points of contact for specific notification categories. We recommend configuring Essential Contacts to make sure important information about your Google Cloud resources reaches the correct personnel promptly. Think of Essential Contacts as a primary contact directory to improve responsiveness and accountability across diverse operational functions. Failure to establish and maintain Essential Contacts can result in missed critical notifications within those designated categories.
The following are some key benefits of configuring Essential Contacts:
Essential Contacts acts exclusively as a central directory for your custom contacts, with IAM principals as a fallback if you don't configure contacts for a specific category. For more information about recommended contacts per category, see Notification categories.
Essential Contacts only provides contact information that other Google Cloud services can use, but it doesn't send or manage notification emails itself. Individual services retrieve contact details for their purposes and have their independent permission mechanisms. For example, Advisory Notifications retrieves details from Essential Contacts to display sensitive data from critical notifications within the Google Cloud console, including security and privacy information. However, you require additional roles to access Advisory Notifications.
Each Google Cloud service determines its own notification needs and specifics, including message content, sender email addresses, and delivery frequency. Consequently, not all Google Cloud offerings use Essential Contacts to send notifications.
Note: This document doesn't provide a comprehensive list of all services using Essential Contacts, their sender email addresses, or any additional IAM roles to access those services. For detailed information about notifications from specific Google Cloud services, refer to their documentation.To help you anticipate who to expect Google Cloud notification emails from, sender email addresses end with the @google.com
address domain. Some notifications for Essential Contacts might include a footer similar to the following to help you identify why you received the message:
"You are receiving this message because your administrator has designated you as an essential contact for the CATEGORY_NAME category."
Notification categoriesYou can assign custom contacts to several notification categories. If you don't add a specific contact to a category, notifications in that category typically go to the fallback contact, selected based on their IAM role. We strongly recommend adding custom contacts for all relevant categories.
You can add both individuals and groups as custom contacts. For information on best practices, see Best practices for Essential Contacts.
Review the following table to learn about notification categories, examples of notifications you might receive, recommended recipients, and why using a custom contact is preferable to relying on the fallback.
Category Description and importance Examples of notifications Recommended custom contact Fallback contact Fallback contact drawbacks Billing Critical billing and payment notifications regarding your Google Cloud account and services.roles/billing.admin
) The Billing Account Administrator might not be the day-to-day finance contact; a dedicated custom billing contact supports prompt attention to financial matters. Legal Official legal and compliance notifications.
roles/billing.admin
) Legal matters often require specialized legal team review; direct routing to custom contacts is crucial. Product updates Information about changes to Google Cloud products and services.
roles/owner
) Project Owners might not be focused on strategic product evolution; dedicated custom contacts make sure relevant teams are informed. Security Urgent notifications regarding security and privacy issues affecting your resources or account.
roles/resourcemanager.organizationAdmin
) Security is a highly specialized area; direct alerts to security experts that you set as custom contacts help with rapid response and mitigation. Suspension Notifications about potential or actual account and project suspensions because of policy violations or other issues.
roles/owner
) Suspension notices require immediate action; making sure they reach the custom operational team responsible for resolution is critical. Technical Operational issues, technical events, and important updates relevant to the stability and functioning of your services.
roles/owner
) Technical notifications can be high volume and require specific technical expertise; routing to custom operational teams is more effective. All All notifications from every other category.
Use it for comprehensive logging or routing by automated systems for a potentially large number of notifications.
Notifications for all other categories(It is a superset.)
Automated systems, such as ticketing or logging, and central operations teams. N/A(It is essential for broad oversight if specific categories aren't granularly assigned.)
N/A Best practices for Essential ContactsFollow these best practices to configure and manage your Essential Contacts effectively:
Use group aliases, mailing lists, or shared email addresses: Configure distribution lists or group email addresses like security-team@yourcompany.com
or gcp-billing@yourcompany.com
instead of individual email addresses to receive notifications.
This practice significantly reduces the risk of missed notifications because of personnel changes and simplifies ongoing management.
Assign custom contacts for every relevant category: Verify that proper contacts are assigned for each notification category that is important to your organization to achieve comprehensive coverage.
Keep contacts up to date and verify details: Regularly review and update contact information. Periodic review and updates help contacts remain current.
Important: Google Cloud cannot automatically detect if an individual contact's email address is no longer valid because of personnel changes, as email addresses can be from any domain. Therefore, establish a regular review cycle to verify and update your Essential Contacts. This practice is critical to make sure notifications reach the intended recipients.Choose the right resource hierarchy level based on inheritance preferences: You can assign contacts at the project, folder, or organization level. Contacts are inherited through the Google Cloud resource hierarchy.
As a result, organizational-level contacts receive notifications for the organization and all its folders and projects, while folder-level contacts receive notifications for that folder and its nested items. Where you assign contacts depends on your organization's structure.
Generally, we recommend the following structure based on organizational practices, especially for sensitive categories like Billing, Legal, and Security:
Recommended level Notification category Organization levelThe level for security contacts depends on your organization's specific security practices. Assign these at the project level if project owners manage their own project security or at the organization level if a central group manages security for all projects. However, as a general guide, we recommend the following notification categories at the organization level:
Technical contacts might receive a large number of notifications. Assign these at the folder or project level to help manage the flow. As a general guide, we recommend the following notification categories at the folder or project level:
In Essential Contacts, each contact has a preferred language setting. Notification creators can reference this setting when sending notifications.
When you add a contact in the Google Cloud console, the Google Cloud console automatically configures the contact's preferred language based on the contact creator's preferred language settings.
When you add a contact using the API, you manually configure the contact's preferred language using a language code. This language code can refer to any of the languages that Essential Contacts supports.
If a notification is not available in the contact's preferred language, the system sends it in English.
Supported languages Language Language code Afrikaans af Albanian sq Amharic am Arabic ar Arabic (Egyptian) ar-EG Armenian hy Azerbaijani az Basque eu Belarusian be Bengali bn Bosnian bs Bulgarian bg Burmese my Catalan ca Chinese zh Chinese (Hong Kong) zh-HK Chinese (Taiwan) zh-TW Croatian hr Czech cs Danish da Dutch nl English en English (Australia) en-AU English (UK) en-GB English (US) en-US Estonian et Filipino fil Finnish fi French fr French (Canada) fr-CA Galician gl German de Gerogian ka Greek el Gujarati gu Hebrew iw Hindi hi Hungarian hu Icelandic is Indonesian id Irish ga Italian it Japanese ja Javanese jv Kannada kn Kazakh kk Khmer km Korean ko Kyrgyz ky Lao lo Latvian lv Lithuanian lt Macedonian mk Malay ms Malayalam ml Marathi mr Mongolian mn Nepali ne Norwegian no Pashto ps Persian fa Polish pl Portuguese pt Portuguese (Brazil) pt-BR Portuguese (Portugal) pt-PT Punjabi pa Romanian ro Russian ru Serbian sr Sindhi sd Sinhala si Slovak sk Slovenian sl Somali so Spanish es Spanish (Latin America) es-419 Swahili sw Swedish sv Tamil ta Telugu te Thai th Turkish tr Turkmen tk Ukranian uk Urdu ur Uzbek uz Vietnamese vi Welsh cy Zulu zu What's nextExcept as otherwise noted, the content of this page is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License, and code samples are licensed under the Apache 2.0 License. For details, see the Google Developers Site Policies. Java is a registered trademark of Oracle and/or its affiliates.
Last updated 2025-07-02 UTC.
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