Visibility into the performance of your budgets enables you to better plan and forecast for the future, and determine areas where the budget needs to increase or decrease. To get this visibility, you can use AWS Budget Reports. 

Reports provide a high-level overview of the status of all your budgets and can help inform your decisions.

To create a budget report, you can login to the AWS console. Find the AWS Budgets service, and click on budget reports on the left-hand side. From here, you can click “create report” and then select the budgets you’d like to create a report for. 

After that, you can select the frequency in which you’d like to receive these reports, whether that’s daily, weekly, or monthly.  Keep in mind that each report costs $0.01. Then, you can specify the email addresses that you’d like to receive the reports. You can put up to 50 email addresses in this box but since I don’t know 50 people, I’ll just specify my own email address, alana.layton@cloudacademy.com.

Last, you can name your report and then click create report. Once you create this report, your reports will then be delivered to the email addresses you specified at the interval you selected.

Now let’s take a look at one of these emails and see what it looks like. This is an example of a report I created for two budgets in my account. The first budget called “CA Budget” tracks my daily spend. As you can see, I typically spend around $0.49 daily, and my current spend has exceeded that, at $.61. Additionally I have another budget called “EC2 Usage” that tracks my EC2 instance running hours. I budgeted 30 instance running hours, and currently I’m above that at 48 hours. 

Now I know the status of each of my budgets. And it’s clear that I need to make some changes, as I have greatly exceeded my expected cost and usage. So, I’m off to go stop a few of my EC2 instances, which will reduce my running hours and my cost and hopefully my report will look better tomorrow. 

See you next time!