---
title: "Budget and cost monitoring"
slug: "budget-and-cost-monitoring"
updated: 2026-10-29T11:13:41Z
published: 2026-10-29T11:13:41Z
canonical: "docs.turbo360.com/budget-and-cost-monitoring"
---

> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.turbo360.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Budget and cost monitoring

## Overview

Cost Analyzer's budget and cost monitoring capabilities help you track Azure spending against defined targets and receive alerts when thresholds are breached. Cost Analyzer provides four budget and monitoring capabilities, each serving a distinct purpose in the cost governance lifecycle.

### Business value

- Set spending limits to prevent budget overruns before they occur
- Project future costs using growth rates or planned values
- Detect unusual cost spikes automatically using automatic anomaly detection
- Define custom monitoring rules for precise, scenario-specific alerting

## How it works

### Budget planner

The **Budget planner** visualizes historical Azure cost trends and projects future spend based on a planned cost value or a defined growth percentage. It supports ML-powered forecasting with upper and lower cost limit estimates for upcoming months.

→ [Budget planner](https://docs.turbo360.com/docs/budget-planner)

### Group budget

**Group budget** enables threshold-based budget monitoring on a cost management group. Define a spending limit and configure notification channels; alerts trigger automatically when spend approaches or exceeds the threshold. Group budget alert incidents also drive the **health indicator** on each cost management group in the tree view.

→ [Group budget monitoring](https://docs.turbo360.com/docs/group-budget-monitoring)

### Custom monitors

**Custom monitors** let you define rule-based cost monitoring beyond standard budget thresholds. Set conditions based on specific metrics, time intervals, or resource scopes, such as VM costs only or costs associated with a specific tag, to trigger alerts for scenarios not covered by group budget monitoring.

→ [Custom monitoring](https://docs.turbo360.com/docs/custom-monitoring)

### Anomaly detection

**Anomaly detection** automatically identifies unusual cost spikes within a cost management group at daily intervals. It uses a standard deviation model based on the past 30 days of cost data to flag deviations. Anomaly detection activates automatically when a cost management group is created.

→ [Automatic anomaly detection](https://docs.turbo360.com/docs/automatic-anomaly-detection)

### Monitoring tab and incidents

All monitoring activity is accessible from the **Monitoring** tab on each cost management group. The tab is divided into seven sub-tabs: Overview, Group budget, Anomaly detection, Custom monitors, Budget planner, Incidents, and Change history. The Overview sub-tab provides a consolidated summary of budget status, recent anomalies, active monitor count, and today's spend alongside a status calendar. All alerts generated by Group budget, Anomaly detection, and Custom monitors are consolidated in the **Incidents** sub-tab, where they can be reviewed, filtered, acknowledged, closed, and reopened. The **Change history** sub-tab lists the configuration changes made to the group's monitoring, newest first.

→ [Managing monitoring incidents](https://docs.turbo360.com/docs/managing-monitoring-incidents)

→ [Monitoring change history](https://docs.turbo360.com/docs/monitoring-change-history)

## FAQs

1. **Group budget vs Custom monitors: what's the difference?** Group budget sets a spending limit for a cost management group as a whole and alerts when that limit is crossed. Custom monitors offer rule-based alerting with filters such as subscription, resource type, resource group, and tags, enabling more granular cost monitoring within or across groups.
2. **Can multiple monitoring types run on the same cost management group?** Yes. Budget planner, Group budget, Custom monitoring, and Anomaly detection can all be active simultaneously on the same cost management group.
3. **Where do alert incidents appear?** All monitoring incidents from Group budget, Anomaly detection, and Custom monitors are consolidated in the **Incidents** sub-tab of the **Monitoring** tab on the cost management group. See [Managing monitoring incidents](https://docs.turbo360.com/docs/managing-monitoring-incidents) for details on filtering, state management, and notification history.

## Related articles

- [Cost management groups](https://docs.turbo360.com/docs/cost-management-groups)
- [Budget planner](https://docs.turbo360.com/docs/budget-planner)
- [Group budget monitoring](https://docs.turbo360.com/docs/group-budget-monitoring)
- [Custom monitoring](https://docs.turbo360.com/docs/custom-monitoring)
- [Automatic anomaly detection](https://docs.turbo360.com/docs/automatic-anomaly-detection)
- [Managing monitoring incidents](https://docs.turbo360.com/docs/managing-monitoring-incidents)
- [Managing analysis views](https://docs.turbo360.com/docs/managing-analysis-views)