Overview
Budget alerts are a critical safety net for cloud spending. They allow you to set a budget for a specific period (e.g., monthly) and receive notifications (via email, SMS, or Slack) when your costs reach a certain percentage of that budget.
Key Features
- Actual vs. Forecasted: Alerts can be based on current spending or predicted spending for the rest of the month.
- Granularity: Budgets can be set for the entire account or filtered by tags, services, or regions.
- Automated Actions: Advanced alerts can trigger scripts to shut down resources or change scaling policies to prevent further spending.
Importance
Prevents 'bill shock' caused by unexpected traffic spikes, misconfigured resources, or forgotten experiments.