Making sure you don't end up with surprise charges on your bill and you stay
within a defined budget are keys to a successful cloud project.
AWS offers us billing alarms and budgets to help us with this.
A budget keeps us informed of how our costs and usage progresses and alarms
allow us to respond quickly when a cost or usage exceeds a custom threshold.
Let's see how we can set these up.
Alright,.
I am signed into my AWS management console with my root account because there's
one setting that we have to change here.
I'm going to click on my account here.
Now we're going to scroll down until we find a section that says IAM
user and role access to billing information.
We're going to hit edit here and we're going to click on activate IAM access to
that, then hit update.
Fantastic.
Now we're going to sign out of here and sign back into our least privileged
user.
IAM user,
provide our account ID, our username and password,
and we'll need a multifactor code.
Let's search for billing on the top.
Select that service.
Now we're going to hit on budgets and then we're going to hit create a budget.
We're going to make sure it's set to cost budget,
which will monitor your costs against a specified amount and receive alerts when
your user defined thresholds are met. Select set your budget,
and we're going to name this getting started,
started budget.
The period will be monthly, so that's fine. And we can set it to recurring,
which is fine. And start month will be this month,
which is February, 2021. Fantastic.
We're going to create a budget that tracks against a single monthly budgeted
amount, and that's a fixed amount. I'm going to set it to $15.
So let's scroll down a little more.
Fantastic. Alright, so now we can go ahead and click configure thresholds.
Now we want to select actual cost, not forecasted,
and we're going to click on a threshold here and we'll provide a value.
So we'll say this threshold is set based on actual cost when it is greater than
50%, which of the $15 would be $7.50.
I'm actually going to add another threshold as well.
We're going to hit add there. Oh, you know what?
I forgot to provide an email here. Hold on a second.
This is the email that we're going to get alerts from the budget. Right,
then I'm going to hit new threshold
and I'm going to set this one to 75.
Provide an email,
fantastic. Let's hit confirm budget.
Let's just review all this and we'll see the budget type, costs, budget details,
getting started budget, resets monthly, starts January 31st,
and there is no end date. Budgeted amount is $15,
and we have one threshold for 50%, one email recipient,
and then Threshold 2 when the actual cost is greater than 75%.
Now we're going to hit create. Alrighty, let's click into that budget.
And we'll see here, we have sort of a dashboard - current versus budgeted,
forecasted versus budgeted, threshold, budget details, et cetera.
Now we don't have any data in here.
That's because we recently created this account, right?
But it is a fantastic idea to set up budgets, which we just did,
and alarms to make sure we don't get any unexpected
costs or charges on our monthly invoice.
One thing I will tell you is that we can see all these details
in this dashboard,
but this data is not in real time and can be up to 24 hours delayed.
So just keep that in mind. Alrighty,
this is actually another budget that I've set up a couple of days ago.
You can see that the start date was the 1st of January, 2021.
The name of this budget is Monthly EC2 budget.
We see that we've consumed about 22 cents. And remember, once more,
this is not in real time. It can be delayed up to 24 hours, right?
So the data is not in real time, but we have some information here.
We can see sort of a timeline here in the graph of when things were consumed.
And we have our thresholds over here and we can also make some changes to the
budget if we'd like to. We hit edit, we can change the period,
if it's recurring or expiring, fixed,
the budgeted amount. We can also change the thresholds if we wanted to.
I have four set here because I like to be extra careful.
We can change the threshold amount into each of these individual thresholds,
but I'm actually pretty happy with this budget. So I'm not going to change it,
but this is the kind of data that you can expect as you keep using your AWS
account and you keep creating new resources and using all the services AWS has
to offer.
One last thing I want to show you for this demo is what a billing alarm
email will look like.
So you see the subject actually includes our budget name and it tells us that
that budget has exceeded your alert threshold.
It provides us the budget name once again, the type, the amount, the alert type,
the alert threshold in the actual amount. And from here,
you can go straight into your AWS budget's dashboard to get more information.
This is what you can expect to get when you get an email of a budget that has
exceeded your alert threshold.
And that's it, we've set up a budget and a budget alert.
We took a look at our budget's overview and data.
We also saw what a budget alert email looks like.
We now have all the info we need to make sure we don't go over budget with our
AWS expenses.
I'll make sure to provide some additional resources in the show notes if you'd
like to learn a bit more on budgets and alerts.
That's it for this episode of ACG Fundamentals,
go on and create a budget and alarm for your AWS account.
Give us a thumbs up once you do.
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Keep being awesome Cloud Gurus, I'll see you in the next one.