SAA-C03 Practice Question 70: Cost Allocation Tags Budgets
AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03) · Test 7 · question 10 of 10
Eight product teams share three AWS accounts. Finance needs a monthly breakdown of spend per team, and each team lead should be emailed automatically once their team passes 80% of its agreed monthly allowance. Teams already tag most resources with a Team key, though nothing enforces it and the tag has never been used for billing.
Which combination should the architect put in place?
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Answer:
Tagging alone does nothing for billing: a user-defined tag must be *activated* as a cost allocation tag in the Billing and Cost Management console before it appears in Cost Explorer or a cost allocation report. Once activated, costs are grouped by the tag's values, which gives finance the per-team breakdown across all three accounts. AWS Budgets then filters on the same tag, one budget per team, and sends an alert at a threshold of the budgeted amount, the 80% notification, delivered without anyone watching a dashboard. Note that only the organization's management account can activate cost allocation tags.
Option B detects the wrong thing. Cost Anomaly Detection flags unusual spend patterns against a learned baseline; a team that rises steadily and predictably to 100% of its allowance is not an anomaly and would never trigger an alert.
Option C addresses the tagging hygiene gap and stops there. A Config rule reports resources missing the tag, which is a useful complement, but it produces no cost figures and no threshold alerting.
Option D can produce the breakdown, but only after the tag has been activated for cost allocation, so it presupposes half of the correct answer. It is also a manual query at month end with no alerting at all, which leaves a team lead to discover the overspend after it has happened.
Reference: Organizing and tracking costs using AWS cost allocation tags