Budgets and alerts

A budget tells the people you choose when spend nears or passes a monthly limit. It never blocks anything: switching off a feature your customers use is a decision for a person, not a threshold.

What a budget covers

Each budget is a monthly limit in one currency, for one of:

• The whole project
• A provider, such as AWS or OpenAI
• A service, as the bill names it, such as AmazonEC2
• A team, feature, customer or user, as your tags or usage data name them. An owner's spend includes what usage data and allocation rules allocated to it, as Explore shows it.
• A saved view: the total Explore shows for one of the project's saved views, such as the payments team's spend on EC2 in one account. Renaming the view keeps the budget; it cannot be deleted while the budget measures it.

Only spend billed in the budget's currency counts. CostReveal never converts between currencies.

Spend and forecast

Spend is month to date, from the bills themselves, and updates as each provider reports. Every provider reports a day late or later, so a day is complete once a later day has been billed.

The forecast states its method beside it:

Each budget is forecast from its own spend, day by day: each provider from its own last complete day, plus each day left in the month at its weekday's average over the four weeks before, or at the last seven days' average with under two weeks of history. A project, provider or service is read from the bills; an owner or a saved view from what Explore attributes to it, day by day, so a team's forecast follows the team's own spend, however the rest of the project moves. The Insights forecast is the same method for the whole project, with its range and confidence.

There is no forecast before three complete days of the month. Month by month shows what the budget's scope spent in each of the last twelve months.

Alerts

Alert	Raised when
Budget warning	Spend passes the warning threshold, 80 percent by default
Budget passed	Spend passes the critical threshold, 100 percent by default
Budget forecast	The month is forecast to pass the limit, while it is not yet passed
Cost spike	A service's last complete day rises well above the seven days before it
Savings opportunity	A new way to save worth at least 1 percent of the last 30 days' spend: a recommendation of AWS, Azure Advisor or Google Cloud Recommender, or a Kubernetes cluster's idle capacity last month
Weekly summary	On Monday, the week before against the one before it, the services that moved most, and the month's forecast

Each alert is raised once: a budget's warning, passed and forecast alerts once a month, and each cost spike once. Changing a budget's limit lets it alert again against the new limit. In the first five days of a month, the month before is checked too, as late charges land.

Cost spikes

For each provider and service, the last complete day is compared with the average of the seven days before it. It is a spike when it is above that average by the project's spike threshold, 40 percent by default, and the rise is also at least 1 percent of the project's average daily spend, so a service moving by cents is never an alert. Only recent days are considered, so connecting a provider with months of history alerts no one.

The alert names what drove the rise, measured against the same seven days' average: the value that rose most on up to three dimensions, the team, feature, customer and user first, then custom dimensions, a cluster's workloads, the account and the region, such as Largest rises: team payments, up $200.00; account Production, up $180.00.

Insights lists cost spikes with their evidence, the day, what it cost and the average it is compared with, and every alert raised for the project.

Who is alerted

In Settings, Notifications, owners, admins and billing members choose:

• Recipients: email addresses, each subscribed to the kinds of alert it wants.
• The cost spike threshold, from 10 to 1,000 percent.
• Slack: an incoming webhook for one channel. CostReveal posts a test message before saving it, keeps it encrypted, and only ever accepts an address on hooks.slack.com. A message Slack does not accept is retried for several hours. Removing Slack stops every message still waiting.

Who can change budgets

Everyone who can see a project's costs can see its budgets and alerts. Owners, admins and billing members create, change and delete budgets and choose who is alerted. Every change is recorded in Audit logs.