A surprise party may be fun, but a surprise on your card bill, probably not. Thankfully, you can set up budgets and alerts using Google Cloud platform to closely monitor your costs and work with the appropriate teams so that they can take action when needed. In this video, we'll talk about setting up budgets and how you can get notified when there's an unexpected event. Setting a budget in GCP lets you trigger notification when your costs hit or are forecasted to hit a specified amount. You can set up a budget for an entire billing account or multiple budgets for different combinations of projects and GCP products so that you can stay informed on the areas that matter the most to you. Let's look at the interface where you can manage your budgets, set one up, and see what the options are for notifications. We'll start by going to the budgets and alerts page on the GCP console. You can use the top left navigation to choose Billing, and then select a billing account. From there, click on Budgets & alerts. Only billing account administrators are able to create or update budgets and alerts for a billing account. So make sure you have the right permissions for the billing account you've chosen. On this page, you can see all the budgets that belong to this billing account. Each budget or line item contains key information. On the left, you'll find the budget name which is helpful for you to identify what the budget is meant to track. Next is the budget type which can either be set a specified amount or last month spend. Specified amount is used to set a fixed amount to compare your monthly spend to and last month spent is used to set a target amount based on the previous months spent. We'll come back to budget types when we walk through creating a budget. After that is the scope of the budget, which refers to the combination of projects and GCP products that the budget covers. For example, you might have a single budget for your entire building account, another for just your production projects, one for just ubiquity spend, or you might have a budget for any combination of these. On the right side of the page are the threshold details for when an alert notification should be triggered. Each budget can have multiple thresholds. For example, 50% and 90%. The progress bar lets you know how you're currently tracking against your budgets. Depending on the type of budgets you select, the thresholds become percentages of either a specified amount or of last month spent. Let's go through and create a budget to see all of the available options. We'll do that by clicking the Create Budget button at the top. The first screen that appears is the scope of the budget which includes the name, projects, and products covered. If you don't choose any projects or products from the drop-downs, this budget will default to the entire billing account. Since you can setup as many budgets as you want, feel free to create multiple budgets to track different groups of projects and products based on your needs. On the next screen, you can choose the budget type and amount. If you choose specified amount, you can choose a fixed target for this budget to track towards. Depending on the cost you're trying to measure, that could be $100, $100,000 or more. If you choose last month spend, the amount will be pre-populated based on the scope you just chose and will be updated each month. For example, if you choose a product that you haven't used before or you've only used within the free tier, the amount may show up as zero. This can be a good way to get notified as soon as you start spending money on something you didn't expect to spend money on. In addition, you can choose to include credits in your budget amount. Including credits means you'll take the total cost then subtract any credits that were applied for that billing period. Credits may include things like usage discounts, promotions, or grants. On the next step, you'll be able to set up the actions. You can set up different thresholds based on the amount from the previous step for when the alert notifications to trigger. For example, you may want to get an alert when you've reached 50%, 90%, and 100% of your budget for the current month. You can also add additional thresholds in case you want more granularity and each threshold can be based on actual or forecasted cost. Actual cost threshold trigger when the spend from the scope you selected exceeds the specified amount. For example, you could set up a 50% actual threshold on $1,000 budget and you'll get an alert notification when your costs exceed $500. Forecasted cost thresholds trigger when your cost is predicted to exceed the threshold amount by the end of the month. If you add a forecasted cost threshold for 110% on a $1,000 budget, it'll trigger an alert notification as soon as your cost for the total billing period is expected to hit $1,100 even if you're only a few days into the month. There's also an option for connecting a budget to pops up for programmatic budget notifications, which lets you add more advanced cost controls to your budgets. We'll talk about that in more detail in a later video. Now keep in mind that costs associated with GCP products or services are updated at different times. Most services will update costs within an hour, but some may take up to a day to update. Each service has cost based on different metrics as well. We recommend setting multiple budgets so you can get notified as soon as possible and so you can take action if necessary. Once you click Finish you've received your budget and you're good to go. But be sure to allow few hours for the budget to actually kick in. Here is an email alert notification that will sent off for when 100% of a $10 budget was spent. We can see the display name of the budget, the budget amount and period, the triggering threshold, and the associated billing account ID in the email. It's also easy to get straight to the budget page in case you want to see more information or edit your budgets. Only billing account administrators and billing account users will get email notifications for budget. Remember, budget alerts are sent out based on rules you set, but don't actually stop an usage from happening. If you want to go beyond emails and automate actions, you should consider using quotas or programmatic budget notifications, both of which we'll talk about in later videos.
