Budgets and cost anomaly detection in AWS - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Budgets and Cost Anomaly Detection Setup in AWS

📖 Scenario: You are managing cloud costs for a small company. To keep spending under control, you want to set a monthly budget and get alerts if costs go over the budget or if unusual spending happens.

🎯 Goal: Build an AWS Budgets configuration with a monthly budget and enable cost anomaly detection alerts to monitor unexpected cost spikes.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create an AWS Budget with a fixed monthly amount of $500

Set the budget to track actual costs

Add an alert to notify when costs exceed 80% of the budget

Enable AWS Cost Anomaly Detection for the linked account

Configure anomaly detection to send alerts to an SNS topic

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Companies use budgets and anomaly detection to control cloud spending and avoid surprises in their bills.

💼 Career

Cloud engineers and cost managers need to set budgets and monitor anomalies to optimize cloud costs and alert stakeholders.

1

Create the AWS Budget dictionary

Create a dictionary called budget with these exact keys and values: BudgetName set to "MonthlyCostBudget", BudgetLimit set to 500, and TimeUnit set to "MONTHLY".

AWS

# Your code here to create the budget dictionary

Need a hint?

Use a Python dictionary with keys exactly as BudgetName, BudgetLimit, and TimeUnit.

2

Add alert threshold to the budget

Add a key Alerts to the budget dictionary. Set it to a list with one dictionary that has Threshold set to 80, ComparisonOperator set to "GREATER_THAN", and NotificationType set to "ACTUAL".

AWS

budget = {
    "BudgetName": "MonthlyCostBudget",
    "BudgetLimit": 500,
    "TimeUnit": "MONTHLY"
}
# Add Alerts key with threshold dictionary here

Need a hint?

Alerts is a list with one dictionary inside. Make sure to use the exact keys and values.

3

Create the anomaly detection configuration

Create a dictionary called anomaly_detection_config with keys: AccountId set to "123456789012", MonitorName set to "MonthlyCostAnomalyMonitor", and SnsTopicArn set to "arn:aws:sns:us-east-1:123456789012:CostAnomalyAlerts".

AWS

budget = {
    "BudgetName": "MonthlyCostBudget",
    "BudgetLimit": 500,
    "TimeUnit": "MONTHLY",
    "Alerts": [
        {
            "Threshold": 80,
            "ComparisonOperator": "GREATER_THAN",
            "NotificationType": "ACTUAL"
        }
    ]
}

# Create anomaly_detection_config dictionary here

Need a hint?

Use the exact keys and values for the anomaly detection configuration dictionary.

4

Complete the AWS Budgets and Anomaly Detection setup

Add a key CostFilters to the budget dictionary and set it to a dictionary with LinkedAccount key set to a list containing "123456789012". Then add a key EnableAnomalyDetection set to True in anomaly_detection_config.

AWS

budget = {
    "BudgetName": "MonthlyCostBudget",
    "BudgetLimit": 500,
    "TimeUnit": "MONTHLY",
    "Alerts": [
        {
            "Threshold": 80,
            "ComparisonOperator": "GREATER_THAN",
            "NotificationType": "ACTUAL"
        }
    ]
}

anomaly_detection_config = {
    "AccountId": "123456789012",
    "MonitorName": "MonthlyCostAnomalyMonitor",
    "SnsTopicArn": "arn:aws:sns:us-east-1:123456789012:CostAnomalyAlerts"
}

# Add CostFilters to budget and EnableAnomalyDetection to anomaly_detection_config here

Need a hint?

CostFilters should filter by the linked account ID. Enable anomaly detection by setting the key to True.