Group budget tips

Overview

This article provides best-practice recommendations for configuring cost metrics and alert thresholds when monitoring a group budget.

Business value

Choosing the right cost metric and threshold configuration helps you avoid false spike alerts and gives you earlier warning before a budget is fully spent.

How it works

Daily monitoring – use amortized cost

When using a daily interval for your group budget, prefer the amortized cost metric over actual cost to avoid misleading spikes from reservation purchases.

Reservation purchases are applied on specific days of the month. With actual cost, this creates a visible cost spike on the purchase day. Amortized cost spreads the reservation cost across the resources for the duration of the reservation period, so no single-day spike appears.

If you use a monthly interval instead, both amortized cost and actual cost work effectively.

Monthly monitoring with sub-thresholds

When using monthly monitoring, configure sub-thresholds on your alert conditions so you receive early warnings as spend accumulates — rather than a single alert only when the budget is fully exhausted.

Open the alert conditions on the group budget to configure sub-thresholds, as shown below.

Add additional thresholds to receive an alert when a specific percentage of the budget has been spent.

Related articles

• Group budget monitoring
• Budget planner
• Managing escalation policies in Cost Analyzer