Day 11 - Using AWS CloudWatch to create a Billing alarm
You can monitor your AWS account charges by setting up a CloudWatch alarm. The alarm will trigger once your billing threshold exceeds.
These are the steps you need to follow
Enable Billing Alert
- The first step is enable the billing alerts so that you can monitor the estimated AWS charges.
NOTE: After you enable the billing alert it will take 15 minutes before you can view the billing data and set billing alarms.
- Go to the AWS Billing console https://console.aws.amazon.com/billing/ . You must be in US East(N. Virginia) region and signed as a root user or IAM user must have permission to view billing information.
- Choose Billing preferences and then click on Receive Billing Alerts and then Save preferences.

Create CloudWatch Billing Alarm
- Go to CloudWatch Console https://console.aws.amazon.com/cloudwatch/ (make sure you are in N. Virginia region as all the Billing metric data is stored in this region)
- Click on All alarms and Create alarm

- Choose Select metric, under All metric tab, choose Billing.

- Under Billing, Total Estimated Charge

- Select metrics(USD) and Graphed metrics

- Under Graphed metrics, click on Select metric at the bottom of the screen

- Under threshold value put 5 or depend upon your requirement

- Under Notification you can either select the existing SNS topic or Create a new topic. Click Next at the bottom of the screen.

- Give your alarm some meaningful name and click Next. Click on Create Alarm.

- Now as soon as my AWS account charge exceed above $5 I will receive a billing alert.