Question

How do I set budget alerts for a GCP project, so that I am notified when I reach a threshold?

Answer 1

The budget amount you set is used to calculate the thresholds that trigger sending alert notifications. The budget does not set a hard cap on spending.

To create a budget:

1. Go to the Google Cloud Platform Console.

2. Open the console navigation menu (menu) and click Billing.

3. If you have more than one billing account, select Go to linked billing account to manage the current project's billing. To locate a different billing account, select Manage billing accounts and choose the account for which you'd like to set a budget.

4. Select Budgets & alerts from the Billing navigation menu.

5. Click add_box CREATE BUDGET.

6. Set the budget Scope:

   1. In the Name field, enter a name for the budget.

   2. In the Projects field, select one or more projects that you want to apply the budget alert to. To apply the budget alert to all the projects in the billing account, choose Select all.

   3. In the Products field, select one or more products that you want to apply the budget alert to. To apply the budget alert for all the products in the billing account, choose Select all.

      Note: If you want to apply the budget alert to the billing account, select all projects and products.

   4. Click Next.

7. Set a monthly budget Amount:

   1. Select the Budget type:

      • Choose Specified amount to set a fixed amount that your monthly spend is compared against.

      • Choose Last month's spend to target an amount that updates each month based on the last month's spend.

      Note that the monthly spend resets to $0 on the first day of every month.

   2. If you're setting the budget to a specified amount, enter that amount in the Target amount field. If you're basing the budget on the previous month's spend, the target amount updates automatically.

   3. Optionally, you can choose to enable Include credits in cost. Include credits in cost is the total cost minus any applicable credits. Credits may include usage discounts, promotions, and/or grants to use Google Cloud Platform.

   4. Click Next.

8. Set the budget Actions:

   1. Set alert threshold rules to send email alert notifications to billing admins and users after the actual or forecasted spend exceeds a percent of the budget or a specified amount.

      • Default alert threshold rules are provided.

      • You can customize budget alert threshold rules. For more information, proceed to the next section, Set, edit, or remove budget alert threshold rules.

   2. To programmatically Manage notifications, connect a Pub/Sub topic to this budget. 

9. To save the budget, click Finish.

Comments

I have a requirement that need to trigger an email alert to recipients for consumption of their individual google cloud projects, not at the billing account level. We have to implement this through any scripting language. Any suggestions how to implement on this please.

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Hi@Jagan

You can get the billing details from your command line. There you can create your own customized python code. For example, You can say when the gcloud billing command run, the python script will mail you.

$ gcloud organizations list
$ gcloud beta billing accounts list

$ gcloud beta billing projects link ${project_id} \
            --billing-account ${ORGANIZATION_BILLING_ACCOUNT}