Monitor AWS Billing Using Billing Alert, Amazon CloudWatch, and AWS Budgets

4 min readJan 31, 2021

When you use cloud services like AWS you are charged with what type of services that you use. Have you ever experienced that your cloud services charges are out of your budget? Well, you can monitor your charges using Billing Alert, Amazon Cloudwatch, and AWS Budgets. So you can get a notification of how much you charge for the services.

Here are steps to monitor your AWS charges

Set Billing Preferences

Step-1:

Go to the AWS console and login using your credentials. After that, go to the My Billing Dashboard menu

Step-2:

Go to the Billing Preferences and check on Receive PDF Invoice by Email and Receive Billing Alerts. Also, check on Receive Free Tier Usage Alerts and input your email if you are using AWS Free Tier.

Step-3:

Click Save Preferences, after that you will receive email notifications when your charges reach a specified threshold.

Create a Billing Alarm Using Amazon CloudWatch

Amazon CloudWatch is basically a monitoring service, so you can monitor your AWS services and trigger an alarm when something unexpected happens

Step-1:

Search CloudWatch on the search bar

Step-2:

Go to the billing menu and click create alarm

Step-3:

You can set up the condition. For example, if you are using AWS free tier, you can set the value to 0. So you will get an alert if your estimated charges are greater than $0. After you finished setting up the condition, click next

Step-4:

When an alarm is triggered we want to create a new topic. So you can select in alarm trigger, select create a new topic for the SNS topic, input the topic name, input your email that will receive the notification, click create topic and click next

Step-5:

Input alarm name. For example, Billing alert. After that, click next

Step-6:

You can preview everything that you have input. If you are satisfied, click create alarm

If successful, you will see an alert “Successfully created alarm” and the billing alarm is created

Using AWS Budgets to Monitor your Billing

Step-1:

Search AWS Budgets on the search bar

Step-2:

Click on the Budgets menu, and then click create a budget

Step-3:

Select budget type. You can select Cost Budget if you want to receive an alert when your costs are against a specified amount

Step-4:

Input your budget name and the timeframe

Step-5:

Specify your budget. If you are using AWS Free Tier, then you can specify $1 in the budgeted amount

Step-6:

Define budget threshold. If you input 10% of the budgeted amount in the alert threshold then when the actual cost is greater than 10% it will trigger the notification. Also, input your email and click confirm budget