How to set up AWS Budget Alerts to prevent surprises

In this post, I’ll explain how to set up an AWS Budget Alert and why it’s important.

You can use AWS Budgets to track and take action on your AWS costs and usage. You can use AWS Budgets to monitor your aggregate utilization and coverage metrics for your Reserved Instances (RIs), or Savings Plans.

You can monitor and receive notifications on your budgets free of charge. In addition to budget monitoring, you can add actions to your budgets to control IAM and Service Control Policy permissions as well as AWS resources when thresholds are exceeded (or forecasted to exceed).

Begin by clicking on your logged-in name located in the top-right corner, then select “Billing and Cost Management” from the dropdown menu.

If you encounter an error message stating “You Need Permissions,” it indicates that you are using an IAM user without access to the Billing and Cost Management dashboard.

To address this issue, follow these steps:

1. Login as the Root user
2. Click on you Root account on the top-right corner and select “My Account”
3. Scroll down to “IAM User and Role Access to Billing Information”
4. Click “Edit”
5. Check the “Activate IAM Access” checkbox
6. Click “Update”

Now you should be able to set up budgets using your IAM user. Follow these steps to set up a budget:

1. Go to the “Billing and Cost Management”
2. Click “Budgets” on the left pane
3. Click “Create a Budget”
4. Here select a budget type, I have selected a monthly budget of 100$

You can always navigate to “Billing and Cost Management” > “Budgets” and select your budget to monitor it. And also:

• Compare current spending to budgeted amount
• Compare forecasted spending to budgeted amount (Month-to-date)
• See your budget history
• Change the budget period
• Update the budgeted amount ($)
• Set the budget scope by adding filtering and use advanced options to narrow the set of cost information tracked as part of this budget
• Update the email recipients
• Setup Amazon SNS alerts
• Setup AWS Chatbot Alerts – AWS Chatbot lets you send budget alerts to the Amazon Chime, Slack or Microsoft Teams chat rooms of your choice which can by handy
• Set alert thresholds – When should this alert be triggered? And how should this alert be triggered?

Setting up budget alerts is essential to avoid surprises. Additionally, I recommend configuring AWS Chatbot Alerts to receive notifications in your preferred channel. If you have any questions or thoughts, please feel free to comment!