Expenditure Awareness: Cost and Governance Usage

Bmwitcher
4 min readJun 26, 2020

--

Use Case:

  • Implement AWS Budgets to notify on usage and spend
  • Create an AWS Budget report to notify users every week on budget status

Step 1: Login to console and type in “billing” in the service search bar

Step 2: Select budgets on the left side, then click create budget near the top left, then select cost budget, then click set up budget.

Step 3: Enter in a Name (i.e. My Budget1, CostBudget1 — anything you’d like), leave all defaults and enter in a budget amount. Scroll down and hit “configure alerts”

Step 4. Under the configure alerts page. Select Forecasted Costs. Alert Threshold should be set to 100%, and enter in a personal email to receive notifications. Then review and create.

YOU HAVE NOW CREATED A FORECASTED BUDGET! When your forecasted costs for the entire account (root account — as recommended for consolidated billing — AWS Organizations) are predicted to exceed the forecast you will receive a notification via email. Next, we will create and ACTUAL budget that is based on current costs.

Step 1: Click on “create budget” in the top right corner

Step 2: Leave the option set to COST BUDGET and click set your budget

Step 3: Enter your budget details such as name, period or frequency, type of budget effective dates (here we selected recurring budget to notify us monthly), at a fixed amount, with a budge of $1.

3a. Under the service tab select EC2-Instance(Elastic Compute Cloud — Compute) and apply the filters. De-select Upfront reservation fees. Configure alerts.

Step 4: Configure alerts: Alerts here will be based on Actual costs, 100% of the budgeted amount, and your email contact info. DON’T forget to check the SNS notification box if you want to receive the email.

Step 5: Review and click create

Next…We will create a monthly savings plan coverage budget if the coverage of the savings plan for the EC2 is below the amount we will set.

Step 1: Click “create budget” again in the top right corner.

Step2: Select savings plan budget and “click set your budget”

Step3: Configure your alerts by entering in a name of your choice for the alerts on a monthly period and make sure to select the coverage option (utilization should on be used for a single and specific discount rate by using filters), and the threshold should be set to 90%. Click configure alerts

Step4: enter your email contact info (don’t forget to click the notify via SNS if you want the email). Click confirm budget.

Step5: Review and Create.

Final agenda item we will create an AWS Budget Report which will allow you to create and send monthly reports based on your frequency of choosing to monitor the performance of your AWS Budgets.

Step1: Click on Budget Reports, then create a budget report

Step2: Name the report. Select all budgets below or the amount of your choosing based on what you/your company requests. Then configure the delivery setting.

Step 3: Configuring delivery settings. Choose your frequency, Day you would like to receive the notification and email contact. Then confirm the budget report. Review and Create.

Your budget report is now created. *Please do not forget to tear down and delete the budget reports if you are using your free tier AWS account like I am*

Sign up to discover human stories that deepen your understanding of the world.

Free

Distraction-free reading. No ads.

Organize your knowledge with lists and highlights.

Tell your story. Find your audience.

Membership

Read member-only stories

Support writers you read most

Earn money for your writing

Listen to audio narrations

Read offline with the Medium app

--

--

Bmwitcher
Bmwitcher

Written by Bmwitcher

DevSecOps Professional — AWS Certified DevOps Professional/Security Specialty/SA Pro, Gitlab Certified, Terraform Associate GCP-ACE Certfied and more…

No responses yet

Write a response