Services or capabilities described in Amazon Web Services documentation might vary by Region. To see the differences applicable to the China Regions, see Getting Started with Amazon Web Services in China (PDF).

Best practices for Amazon Budgets

Note the following best practices when you're working with budgets.

Best practices for controlling access to Amazon Budgets

To allow users to create budgets in the Amazon Billing and Cost Management console, you must also allow users to do the following:

To learn more about giving users the ability to create budgets on the Amazon Budgets console, see Allow users to create budgets.

You can also create budgets programmatically using the Budgets API. When configuring access to the Budgets API, we recommend creating a unique user role for making programmatic requests. This helps you define more precise access controls between who in your organization has access to the Amazon Budgets console and the API. To give multiple users query access to the Budgets API, we recommend creating a role for each of them.

Best practices for budget actions

Using managed policies

There are two Amazon managed policies to help get you started with budget actions. One for the user, and the other for budgets. These policies are related. The first policy ensures a user can pass a role to the budgets service, and the second allows budgets to execute the action.

If you don't have proper permissions configured and assigned for the user and for Amazon Budgets, Amazon Budgets can't execute your configured actions. To ensure proper configuration and execution, we've configured these managed policies so your Amazon Budgets actions work as intended. We recommend you use these IAM policies to be sure you don't have to update your existing IAM policy for Amazon Budgets when a new functionality is included. We will add new capabilities to the managed policy by default.

For details about managed policies, see Managed policies.

To learn more about Amazon Budgets actions, see the Configuring budget actions section.

Using Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling

If a budget action is used to stop an Amazon EC2 instance in an Auto Scaling Group (ASG), Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling restarts the instance, or launches new instances to replace the stopped instance. Therefore, "shutdown budget actions is not effective to Amazon EC2/Amazon RDS budget actions" aren't effective unless you combine a second budget action that removes permissions on the role used by the Launch Configuration managing the ASG.

Best practices for setting budgets

Use Amazon Budgets to set custom budgets based on your costs, usage, reservation utilization, and reservation coverage.

With Amazon Budgets, you can set budgets on a recurring basis or for a specific time frame. However, we recommend setting your budget on a recurring basis so that you don't unexpectedly stop receiving budget alerts.

Best practices for using the advanced options when setting cost budgets

Cost budgets can be aggregated by unblended costs, amortized costs, or blended costs. Cost budgets can also either include or exclude refunds, credits, upfront reservation fees, recurring reservation charges, non-reservation subscription costs, taxes, and support charges.

Understanding the Amazon Budgets update frequency

Amazon billing data, which Budgets uses to monitor resources, is updated at least once per day. Keep in mind that budget information and associated alerts are updated and sent according to this data refresh cadence.

Best practices for setting budget alerts

Budget alerts can be sent to up to 10 email addresses and one Amazon SNS topic per alert. You can set budgets to alert against either actual values or forecasted values.

Actual alerts are only sent out once per budget, per budget period, when a budget first reached the actual alert threshold.

Forecast-based budget alerts are sent out on a per-budget, per-budget period basis. They might alert more than once in a budgeted period if the forecasted values exceed, dip below, and then exceed the alert threshold again during the budgeted period.

Amazon requires approximately 5 weeks of usage data to generate budget forecasts. If you set a budget to alert based on a forecasted amount, this budget alert isn't triggered until you have enough historical usage information.

The following video highlights the importance of setting up budget alerts, which give you control over your spending. It also touches on the use of multi-factor authentication (MFA) to increase the security of your account.

Best practices for setting budget alerts using Amazon SNS topics

When you create a budget that sends notifications to an Amazon SNS topic, you must either have a preexisting Amazon SNS topic or create an Amazon SNS topic. Amazon SNS topics enable you to send notifications over SMS in addition to email.

For budget notifications to be sent successfully, your budget must have permissions to send a notification to your topic, and you must accept the subscription to the Amazon SNS notification topic. For more information, see Creating an Amazon SNS topic for budget notifications.

Best practices for tagging budgets

You can use tags to control access to your Amazon Budgets resources. You can also use resource-level permissions to allow or deny access to one or more Amazon Budgets resources in an Amazon Identity and Access Management (IAM) policy. This allows for easy budget management and auditing, improving governance and information security. You can specify the users, roles, and actions that are permitted on the Amazon Budgets resources.

To add tags to budgets, use Amazon Budgets in the Billing and Cost Management console or programmatically using the Budgets API.

You can add tags when creating an Amazon Budgets resource, or later using the console or the TagResource operation.

You can view the tags on an Amazon Budgets resource using the console or by calling the ListTagsForResource operation.

You can remove tags from an Amazon Budgets resource using the console or by calling the UntagResource operation.