From the course: Complete Guide to AWS Software Deployment

Set an AWS budget alarm - Amazon Web Services (AWS) Tutorial

From the course: Complete Guide to AWS Software Deployment

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Set an AWS budget alarm

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- [Instructor] All right. In this video, we're going to set up a budgeting alarm in AWS, so that you'll always be aware when your spend starts to approach a threshold that you define, giving you time to take action. So we're going to go up here in the search bar and type Budgets. Now, budgets are a feature of a larger umbrella called Billing and Cost Management, so you see that reflected in the search results. We see the service here and the individual features below. Clicking Budgets will drill us into that section specifically. But if you came in through the top of Billing and cost Management, you've got this sidebar here, and you can always go directly to Budgets. Let's click Create budget. All right, we'll use a template that's preselected and click Monthly cost budget. We'll give the budget a name. I'll just call it MyBudget, but this could be more descriptive, because it is possible to set up multiple alarms and multiple thresholds. For here, I'll put in $50. I want to know whenever my spend starts to approach that in any given month. I'll give email recipients here. So this is where you put your own email address, so that you receive a notification. I'll just say a fake one here and move on. Here's the important bit in this window. You will be notified when your actual spend reaches 85% of this threshold, so 85% of 50, and it will notify you again when your actual spend reaches 100%, and it will alert you yet one more time if your forecasted spend is looking like it's going to hit 100% of this value. So you're going to get quite a bit of notification before you actually reach this spend amount. So this is a really useful thing to make sure that your costs never overrun. Click Create budget, and you're done. That's all that has to be done, except for monitoring your email address and watching for those emails to come in. So set that up at whatever dollar amount you're comfortable with, and that will really help you control your spend. Now, you might be wondering what happens when I get one of those emails, and that's where you're going to want to head over to a section called Cost Explorer. Now, there's a lot that could be said about how Cost Explorer works, but the main thing to know is you're going to get a graph that looks a little bit like this, and it will show you the ways that you're spending money in AWS. Each of these colors in this bar represents a different section of AWS. And so you can see this big blue section here is on EC2 instances. I'm spending some on RDS databases. And so it shows you, and it shows you the breakdown of dollars and cents spent on each service. You can click into them and find a little bit more information, but that's a good indicator of where you need to go. You are the one creating these resources. So this should be enough of a hint to go, okay, there's a database I need to go shut down, or something like that. So with Cost Explorer and with Budget Setup, you should be in really good shape to know at all times how to manage your spend in the cloud.

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