With AWS Budgets, you can set up Spend & usage alerts, cost alerts, Reserved Instance and Saving plan alerts so that you will get notified if there are some anomalies in your account. For example, when your account is misconfigured, or the account is compromised, and cost spikes appear in your account, you want to get notified and alerted ASAP and take necessary actions.

We have seen cases where users have all kinds of workloads running in their AWS environment and have all types of Monitoring Systems, yet missed out on configuring the very basics of AWS - AWS Budgets. And when they noticed unusual behaviour in their cloud resources, they came to check the costs, and that’s when they figured out the charges were not right.

This extra spend could be a human error, for example, simple misconfiguration of Lambda actions to loop and upload duplicated resources, or it could be that your credentials are accidentally exposed. Your account is compromised – someone has logged in to your account and ran some expensive EC2 instances. Either way, you must take action and shut down whatever is causing this. This is where AWS Budget come into play.

To set up AWS Budgets, you must log in to your AWS console and navigate to your Billing Console. Under Billing Console’s Cost Management, go to Budgets, and you can simply create Budget.

There are four types of Budgets – Cost Budget, Usage Budget, Saving Plan Budget and Reservation Budget. Cost Budget monitors the cost of a business unit or member account. Usage budget can monitor more specified resource usages such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) or Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3). If you have Saving Plans or Reserved Instances to monitor, you could use Saving plans and Reservation Budgets. There is a Budget Preview window in which you can get a general idea of your account’s usage over the last few months, which is helpful, especially if you want to set the budget to trigger.

The idea is that you have a general idea of your workload on your account. If you set up your AWS environment, you know what your AWS spend looks like or have a general idea of how the usage could expand over a certain period. Let’s say you know your AWS workload usually spends around USD 3000 per month, which is $100 on a daily average. 5% more or less of this budget is acceptable. However, if the daily spend reaches $150, you know there is something definitely going wrong. And you want to get notified and investigate immediately.

If your usage is not fixed, there is a new feature – Auto-adjusting which you can dynamically set your budget for each period based on your spending or usage pattern. Once you know your budget and set your spending threshold, you can set the alert threshold. Once the threshold is reached, you can either send a notification email, use Amazon Simple Notification Services (SNS) to send alerts or send Amazon Chatbot Alerts. And this is how you can easily set up AWS Budgets on your account.

At Westcon, we have AWS Certified Security Professionals with many years of Security experience at your disposal who can help you analyse and secure your AWS infrastructure using modern, leading-edge tools. If you have any questions or concerns about AWS cloud environment security, please do not hesitate to contact the Partner Success centre (PSC) at

NZ Cloud Sales:    +64 9 477 7211              Email:  [email protected]
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