Budget Alerts

Tracking budgets is a vital responsibility of the FinOps teams. It empowers them to uphold financial control, optimize spending, and make informed decisions about the organization's future. The alerts set on a budget that exceeds the threshold play a crucial role in budget tracking by enabling FinOps teams to take timely actions to prevent budget overruns.

The Budget Alerts policy leverages Cloud Budgets to configure alerts for a budget based on a desired threshold, actual, or forecasted spend. This policy triggers an incident when the cloud spend for the selected budget exceeds the threshold or the defined budget. The incident provides the details on the budget group that triggered the incident.

The following sections provide information on how to apply the policy and the roles required to use this policy:

Applying Budget Alerts Policy
Budget Alerts Required Permissions

Applying Budget Alerts Policy

Complete the following instructions to configure the input parameters and apply the Budget Alerts policy.

To apply the Budget Alerts policy:

1. Go to the Automation Catalog page (Automation > Catalog).
2. Find the Budget Alerts policy.
3. Click Apply and complete the following policy fields.

Policy Field

Action to Take

Policy Name

No action is needed.

Policy Description

No action is needed. This field contains a short description of the policy with links to more information about the policy.

Policy Schedule

Select the desired cadence of your emailed reports. The report cadence is relative to the initial launch of the policy. By choosing when to run the policy, you can control the day of the week and time of day when the reports will go out.

Note:There is a delay of 2-3 days before cloud vendors release cost data. Therefore, the most recent days will always be incomplete.

Test Mode

This is a reporting-only policy. The only action taken by the policy is to send the email notification. Selecting or clearing the checkbox will have no effect.

Select Account

Select the account to which you want to apply the policy.

Select Credentials: flexera

Select Flexera One credentials.

Important:The role View budgets is required for policy execution.

Budget Name or ID

Name or ID of the budget to track.

Email addresses

Includes your email by default. You can also add any other email addresses you would like to notify (including non-Flexera Cloud Cost Optimization users).

Filter Group By Dimension(s)

Enables budget tracking for specific dimensions and values. Dimension refers to labels or metadata associated with items in your bill, such as Cloud Vendor, Resource Type, Service, and so on. You can group data by Dimension=Value pairs. Values can be comma-separated to filter by multiple values for the same dimension. Examples, 'Cloud Vendor=AWS' 'Cloud Vendor Account=001234567890,004321876509' 'Category=Compute'.

Note:Supports only dimensions provided in the group previously defined in the budget.

Threshold Percentage

Set the threshold percentage. When the threshold is reached, an alert is raised.

Budget Alert Type

Defines the spend type to check whether Actual Spend or Forecasted Spend. If you select the Actual Spend option, the policy will compare the actual incurred spend against the threshold percentage in respect to the monthly budget value.

In contrast, if you select the Forecasted Spend option, the policy will prorate the incurred cost based on the number of days in the month to project the total cost for the entire month. The policy will then compare this projected cost against the threshold percentage in respect to the monthly budget value.

Unbudgeted Spend

Controls whether alerts should be raised on detected unbudgeted spend. Select Exclude unbudgeted spend or Include unbudgeted spend.

Degree of Summarization

Determines if budget should be tracked as a whole or per dimension groups. Select Summarized to track the overall spend, or select By dimensions to monitor spend by budget groups.

4. Click Apply Policy to apply the Budget Alerts policy.

Budget Alerts Required Permissions

Important:The View budgets role is required to access budget resources. For complete descriptions of each role available in Flexera One, see Flexera One Roles.