Configure Billing Alarm in AWS

AWS CloudWatch is a monitoring and management service in AWS that provides data and actionable insights for AWS resources. You can use CloudWatch to monitor your billing data and send alerts when the bill amount exceeds a certain threshold. Billing metric data is stored in the US East (N. Virginia) region. The first step to get the billing alert is enabling the monitoring of billing charges.

Enable Monitoring of billing charges

  1.  Go to Billing and Cost Management console https://console.aws.amazon.com/billing/.
  2. Choose Billing preferences from the navigation pane on the left side
  3. Choose Receive Billing Alerts and click Save Preferences

The next step is creating a billing alarm

Create a Billing Alarm

  1. Take cloud watch console https://console.aws.amazon.com/cloudwatch/home?region=us-east-1.
  2. Choose  Alarms from the navigation pane and click Create Alarm, then choose Select metric.

    3. Choose Billing, Total Estimated Charge as shown below

  4. choose  USD and hit Select metric

5. You have a few options on the next page. Here, Period is the frequency that CloudWatch checking your account. I have used default values for all the fields as shown below. I am adding an alert whenever my estimated charge goes beyond one dollar. You can enter your threshold value there. Choose Next to go the next page

 6. You can either select an existing SNS topic or create a new SNS topic for sending the notifications. In my case, I selected a new SNS topic and named it "BillingAlarm" and added my email id for receiving the alert. If you want to add more than one email id separate them with commas. After that choose Create topic. You will get an email straightway asking for your consent to subscribe to the SNS notification.  Go to your mailbox and confirm your subscription. Hit Next to go to the next page.

7. Give name and description for your alarm and hit Next

 

8. Review the alarm and hit Create alarm button to create the alarm. The alarm will be created.

 

 


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