Setting up billing alerts in AWS - Try It Yourself

Setting up billing alerts

📖 Scenario: You are managing cloud costs for a small company. To avoid unexpected charges, you want to set up billing alerts that notify you when your AWS costs exceed a certain amount.

🎯 Goal: Create a billing alert using AWS CloudWatch that sends an email notification when the estimated charges exceed $50.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a CloudWatch billing alarm for estimated charges

Set the threshold to $50

Configure an SNS topic for email notifications

Subscribe your email to the SNS topic

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Cloud cost management is critical for businesses to avoid unexpected charges and optimize spending.

💼 Career

Cloud engineers and administrators often set up billing alerts to monitor and control cloud expenses proactively.

1

Create an SNS topic for billing alerts

Create an SNS topic named BillingAlerts using AWS CLI or AWS Console.

AWS

# Create an SNS topic named BillingAlerts
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use the AWS CLI command aws sns create-topic --name BillingAlerts to create the topic.

2

Subscribe your email to the SNS topic

Subscribe your email address [e-mail] to the SNS topic BillingAlerts to receive notifications.

AWS

aws sns create-topic --name BillingAlerts
# Subscribe your email [e-mail] to BillingAlerts
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use aws sns subscribe with --protocol email and your email address.

3

Create a CloudWatch billing alarm

Create a CloudWatch alarm named BillingAlarm that monitors the metric EstimatedCharges in the AWS/Billing namespace. Set the threshold to 50 USD and use the BillingAlerts SNS topic ARN for notifications.

AWS

aws sns create-topic --name BillingAlerts
aws sns subscribe --topic-arn arn:aws:sns:us-east-1:123456789012:BillingAlerts --protocol email --notification-endpoint [e-mail]
# Create CloudWatch alarm BillingAlarm for EstimatedCharges with threshold 50
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use aws cloudwatch put-metric-alarm with the specified parameters to create the alarm.

4

Verify billing alert setup

Verify that the CloudWatch alarm BillingAlarm is created and linked to the SNS topic BillingAlerts by listing your CloudWatch alarms.

AWS

aws sns create-topic --name BillingAlerts
aws sns subscribe --topic-arn arn:aws:sns:us-east-1:123456789012:BillingAlerts --protocol email --notification-endpoint [e-mail]
aws cloudwatch put-metric-alarm --alarm-name BillingAlarm --metric-name EstimatedCharges --namespace AWS/Billing --statistic Maximum --period 21600 --evaluation-periods 1 --threshold 50 --comparison-operator GreaterThanOrEqualToThreshold --alarm-actions arn:aws:sns:us-east-1:123456789012:BillingAlerts --unit None
# List CloudWatch alarms to verify BillingAlarm exists
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use aws cloudwatch describe-alarms --alarm-names BillingAlarm to check the alarm.