Billing alarm email received too late
I have a cloudwatch alarm that triggers if the estimated charges are higher that XUSD for any datapoint within 6hours. I thought this would trigger early enough to avoid charges higher than XUSD, but I just received the first alarm email notificaiton and charges are 20x X USD. I am surprised that this could happen. Looking at the cost explorer, I had charges of X+1 USD every day for the last 10 days, so I imagine the alarm should have triggered every day for the last 10 days.
this is the post I followed in the tutorial when setting up the alarm. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitoring/monitor_estimated_charges_with_cloudwatch.html
How can I avoid this in the future?
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Thank you very much for sharing the alarm details. From an alarm standpoint, it seems normal that the alarm didn't react sooner, since the estimated cost remained below the threshold until the datapoint of January 17.
Hence my understanding is that your concern is more on the estimated charges metric than the alarm itself. Apparently there is a mismatch between the estimated charges metric in your account and what you see in the cost explorer.
Although I believe you should reach out to support to double-check the reason for that discrepancy, I would also like to highlight that the advice shared by Doan Vuong above is a good one, that alarming on usage metrics would be faster in your case. Another suggestion would be to use AWS Budgets. Regardless of whether you decide to give AWS Budgets a try or to alarm on usage metrics instead, I encourage you to ask support for an explanation of the mismatch between the estimated charges metric in your account and the cost explorer view.
Hi, you indicate that you have set an alarm on estimated charges billing metrics, and that alarm triggered later than you expected.
In order for us to help you, I think you may need to please share your alarm definition (please simply hide/remove data such as account id and threshold value), what the email you received look like (same advice to remove data you don't want to leak) Did you check the billing metric graph ? Does the billing metric properly reflect what you see in cost explorer?
In previous event I joined, I have asked about the delay in billing alarm, and they said there is no way to estimate cost in real time. So, you must estimate your usage, and set the cost lower to trigger faster when something in cost goes up.
as one can see from the screenshots below, the alarm definition leads me to think that it would trigger on day 1 of charges being higher than the limit of 5USD, or even if the forecasted charges at the end of the month are higher than that. Instead it triggers the email once the charges are already 130USD.
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Thanks for your support. I am adding some screenshots in the answer below. Personal data is redacted. FYI: the service that I got charged for is Amazon Q - indexing charges.