Billing alerts

Just as CloudWatch monitors other AWS resources, it can also monitor the monthly billing charges for an AWS account. You can set the threshold for billing. As soon as the billing amount reaches the threshold or shoots above the specified threshold, it notifies the specified administrators. You need to enable billing alerts before you can configure alerts on billing data. You can enable billing alerts from the AWS account settings. Remember, only the root user can enable the billing alerts; AWS IAM users cannot do that.

The process of enabling billing alerts is as follows:

1. Log into the AWS account with the root user credentials.
2. Click on the account name and My Billing Dashboard:

Figure 7.11: Opening the My Billing dashboard

3. From the left-hand pane, click on Preferences and check Receive Billing Alerts. Optionally, you can enable Receive PDF invoice By Email...