CLF-C02 Practice Question 19: Cost Alerts
AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C02) · Test 2 · question 9 of 10
The finance team wants to receive an email as soon as the account's spending for the current month is forecasted to exceed $5,000, rather than discovering the overrun on the invoice. Which AWS tool should be used?
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Answer:
AWS Budgets lets you set a custom cost or usage budget and receive notifications by email or Amazon SNS when actual costs (or forecasted costs, before they accrue) exceed the threshold you define. You can even attach budget actions, such as applying an IAM policy that prevents new resources from being provisioned.
Option A, Cost Explorer, is the tempting choice because it visualizes past spending and can forecast future costs, but it is an analysis tool: you view reports in it rather than set a spending threshold that triggers an alert. Option C, Pricing Calculator, estimates the cost of an architecture before you build it; it does not watch real spending. Option D, the Cost and Usage Report, delivers the most detailed line-item billing data to Amazon S3 for analysis, but it does not send threshold alerts.
Reference: Managing your costs with AWS Budgets