Why it matters
Create alerts to know when you are spending too much.
You can set daily or monthly budgets for a single account, across your entire organization, or for a specific service, and get notified in two ways:
- Fixed threshold - Alert when actual spend hits 80%, 100%, etc. of your budget
- Forecast alert - Alert when AWS forecasts your month-end spend will exceed your budget
This catches problems before they become expensive surprises.
Route alerts effectively
- Email - Good for team distribution lists
- SNS - Route to Slack/Teams via webhooks for immediate visibility
- Budget Actions - Auto-stop dev/test instances when non-prod budgets hit 100%
Make sure someone is responsible for responding to budget alerts, otherwise they’re useless.
Best practices
- Review and adjust budgets periodically as usage patterns change
- Use forecasted spend alerts to catch trends before month-end
- Create separate budgets for experiments so you know when to shut them down