Managing how much money is spent in the cloud is probably one of the most
important things to learn in your cloud journey.
Establishing budgets and alerts early on and evaluating them often will help you
not end up with surprise charges on your monthly bill.
Let me show you how to set these up.
Let's start by creating a budget which are important because they allow us to
define a threshold for our Azure expenses that we'd like to stay within.
I'm in my Azure portal and then I'm going to click on a cost management on the
left side.
I'm going to select cost management once again and under cost management.
I'm going to select budgets, click on add.
And first we're going to enter a unique name.
I'm going to set it to learning budget.
Now we get to select the reset period.
I'm going to let it stay on monthly
and the creation date and the expiration date.
It's a good idea to reevaluate budgets.
Whenever your normal consumption changes.
This is a learner budget and it most likely will not be the same when you're
developing full on solutions.
So let's set this to expire in a year. Actually,
that current date is pretty fine for now.
Now we have to provide a budget amount,
this total amount you want your budget to have.
So I'm going to put in,
you can see that I've used $24 last month. So I'm going to say
25, but a more appropriate number might be,
you know, for you $10, $15, $5.
But I think for a starter budget 25 is good. You're going to hit next.
Okay, great.
We've defined our learning budget of $25 and to reset
monthly. Now we can create alerts.
Cost alerts are a great tool because they notify us when we reach a certain
threshold of our defined budget.
And first we have to set up our alert conditions so here it says percentage of
budget.
So I'm going to type in 50% first
and I'm going to add another one at 75 and then another one at a hundred.
So you can see, as I type in those percentages gives us the amount;
so 50%, 12.57, 5%,
18 point 75, and then a hundred percent the 25.
Now you can see, we have a red alert here says action group,
or at least one email address is required for all budget thresholds.
We're going to leave our action group, this dropdown here to none.
And we're going to add an email here for our alerts.
Okay? So you see that red alert under our, uh,
each of our conditions disappeared, action groups are great.
They allow us to, uh, you know,
trigger some kind of action resulting from a budget event,
but we're not going to be using them in this demo. All right, fantastic.
And you can also select your language preference, but a default is fine for me,
and I'm going to go ahead and hit create.
Alrighty. So let's now click into the budget that we just created,
learning budget.
And here you'll be able to see how much you've consumed of this budget and some
more info. Um,
and all this information will help you make more informed financial planning
decisions. For example,
if you find your progress bar of your budget is near a hundred percent early on
in your month, you might need to reevaluate it. You might need to increase the,
the budget amount. Uh,
there are some details that you can edit of the budget in here,
but keep in mind that once you create a budget,
you can't change it's reset period or expiration date.
You'll have to create a new one. So if I hit edit here,
now you can see that all of this option here is grayed out.
I can change the amount, but I can't change the name reset period creation,
date or expiration date. So keep that in mind. Oh,
you can also change your alerts if you need to,
I'm going to show you what it looks like for, since this budget is new.
There's not as much information, but if I click on a budget,
I created a month ago, you'll see that my
Actual Spent went way above the actual budget.
And you see that I have an overview of my budget here and then my
alerts in here as well. Uh,
this is a clear example of a budget I would want to evaluate because you can see
that it's all in red. And I went, over.
Okay. Now let's take a look at our costs, alerts some, get a Holocaust alert.
And since I just created the learning budget, uh,
costs and usage data is typically available within eight to 24 hours.
And your budgets are evaluated against those costs every 24 hours.
So it's not in real time. Um, so of course, since we just created this budget,
it won't have any data,
but we can take a look at an alert that I received on any budget I had
previously created. Um,
so we can click on this one and you'll see this alert details.
The cost is greater than $2 and exceeds starter budget threshold 50%.
And it'll tell us the last update, uh, the name of the condition,
the budget it's applied to the period and who was alerted on this.
And, uh, another thing to keep in mind, that's pretty important.
And this view is the status.
The dismissed status indicates that someone has marked the alert, uh,
to set it as no longer relevant,
but these are active because I haven't dismissed them. So once I dismiss them,
I hit refresh. It's no longer going to appear in this view.
Hold on. I got an error there, dismiss,
there we go. Okay. So once it, like I said, once we dismiss the alert,
it'll disappear. And for each one of these alerts,
we should have also received an email. So let me pull that up.
All right.
So here I have an example of what a cost alert email it looks like right here.
We have, you have an alert for budget starter budget.
Your total spent of budget started budget is now $3 and 2 cents exceeding your
specified threshold of $2 and 50 cents.
And then you get some more information and you get the option to view in the
portal.
And that's it. We've set up a budget and a cost alert.
We took a look at our budgets progress bar and a little bit more info on our
cost alerts.
We also saw what a costs alert email looks like we now have all the info we need
to make sure we don't go over budget with our Azure expenses.
I'll make sure to provide some additional resources in the show notes of this
episode. If you'd like to learn a little bit more on budgets and cost alerts.
Alrighty Cloud Gurus, that's it for this episode of ACG Fundamentals,
let us know how your setup went. And if you liked this episode,
give us a thumbs up. Don't forget to subscribe for more cloud content,
keep being awesome and see you in the next one.