Creating a Budget

Important Notes

Alerts are not supported for the current month for certain monthly-settled cloud services, such as CDN billed by 95th percentile bandwidth, because their usages for the current month will not be billed until the following month.

You can create up to 1,000 budgets.

Each recipient can receive a maximum of 100 alerts a day.

The budget is monitored every hour, so your actual costs or usage may have already exceeded the budget when you receive an alert.

If you are using a master account but have not enabled unified accounting management, you are not allowed to set budgets for your member accounts.

Prerequisites

Before you enable alerting, configure the notification method for Cost Management in Message Center.

Creating a Cost Budget

You can use the following procedure to create a cost budget and specify an alert threshold:

1. Log in to Cost Center.
2. Choose Budgets.
3. Click Create Budget.
4. Select Cost budget, and click Next.
5. Configure the budget details and define the budget scope, and click Next.

   Table 1 Parameters for creating a cost budget (1)

   Parameters	Description
   Budget Name	A unique budget name.
   Reset Period	The reset period for a budget, which can be: Daily: Budget evaluation begins at 00:00 GMT+08:00 on the start date and will be reset to zero at 00:00 GMT+08:00 on each day moving forward. Monthly: Budget evaluation begins at 00:00 GMT+08:00 on the 1st day of the start month and will be reset to zero at 00:00 GMT+08:00 on the 1st day of each month moving forward. Quarterly: Budget evaluation begins at 00:00 GMT+08:00 on the 1st day of the start quarter and will be reset to zero at 00:00 GMT+08:00 on the 1st day of each quarter moving forward. Yearly: Budget evaluation begins at 00:00 GMT+08:00 on the start date and will be reset to zero at 00:00 GMT+08:00 on January 1 each year moving forward.
   Budget Duration	Recurring: You set a start date on which the recurring budgets will begin renewing. Expiring: You set a time range, outside which expiring budgets will not renew.
   Budgeted Amount Plan	Fixed: The budgeted amount is fixed for each reset period. Monthly/Quarterly: The amount is budgeted on a monthly or quarterly basis. Dynamic: The amount is automatically budgeted based on the configured baseline time range.
   Baseline Time Range	There are four options. See Baseline Time Range for details. Last quarter actual Current quarter forecast Last several quarters average Last several quarters compound growth rate
   Budgeted Amount	If Budgeted Amount Plan is Fixed, you just set a fixed value. If Reset Period is Daily or Yearly, you just set a fixed value. If Budgeted Amount Plan is Monthly or Quarterly, set budgeted amounts one by one. If the budgeted amount is not set for a period, the amount most recently entered will be applied. For example, if the budgeted amount is not set for May 2021, the budgeted amount of April 2021 will be used for May 2021. If Budgeted Amount Plan is Dynamic, you do not need to manually set budgeted amount. Because your dynamic budget depends on your cost data, your upcoming budget amounts can fluctuate as your costs change. We will notify all alert recipients when we adjust your budget amount on the 5th day of each month or quarter.
   Budget Scope (optional)	You can define a budget scope as required. Specifically, you can set filters such as Service Type, Enterprise Project, and Region on the left, and the cost data from the last 12 months will be displayed on the right. NOTE: If you are using a master account and want to create a budget for your member accounts, select these member accounts from Linked Account. In the Advanced Settings area, you can configure Cost Type to summarize cost data based on the cost type. If you set Cost Type to Original costs, you can choose to select Include discount. Both discount and truncated amount will be included if you select this option. List price = Original cost + Discount + Truncated amount

6. Configure alert thresholds, including Thresholds and Recipients, and click Next.

   Table 2 Parameters for creating a cost budget (2)

   Parameters	Description
   Thresholds	A maximum of five thresholds can be set for each budget. The following alerting conditions are supported: Actual cost >: If the actual cost reaches a certain amount or a certain percentage of a budgeted amount, an alert will be reported. Forecasted >: If the forecasted cost reaches a certain amount or a certain percentage of a budgeted amount, an alert will be reported. For details about how to create a forecast-based budget, see Creating a Forecasting-based Budget. The threshold value can be a certain amount or a certain percentage of a budgeted amount. Amount (USD): If the actual cost reaches a certain amount, an alert will be reported. (%) of budgeted amount: If the actual cost reaches a certain percentage of a budgeted amount, an alert will be reported.
   Recipients	Information of contacts who will receive alerts. If you want to add or modify recipient information, go to the Recipient Management page in the Message Center. Up to 10 recipients can be added for each budget.

7. Confirm your budget settings and click Save.

Creating a Usage Budget

You can use the following procedure to create a usage budget:

1. Log in to Cost Center.
2. Choose Budgets.
3. Click Create Budget.
4. Select Usage budget and click Next.
5. Configure the budget details and define the budget scope, and click Next.

   Table 3 Parameters for creating a usage budget (1)

   Parameters	Description
   Budget Name	A unique budget name.
   Usage Type	The way a pay-per-use cloud service is billed. Choose the specific service usage measurements that you want the budget to monitor.
   Reset Period	The reset period for a budget, which can be: Daily: Budget evaluation begins at 00:00 GMT+08:00 on the start date and will be reset to zero at 00:00 GMT+08:00 on each day moving forward. Monthly: Budget evaluation begins at 00:00 GMT+08:00 on the 1st day of the start month and will be reset to zero at 00:00 GMT+08:00 on the 1st day of each month moving forward. Quarterly: Budget evaluation begins at 00:00 GMT+08:00 on the 1st day of the start quarter and will be reset to zero at 00:00 GMT+08:00 on the 1st day of each quarter moving forward. Yearly: Budget evaluation begins at 00:00 GMT+08:00 on the start date and will be reset to zero at 00:00 GMT+08:00 on January 1 each year moving forward.
   Budget Duration	Recurring: You set a start date on which the recurring budgets will begin renewing. Expiring: You set a time range, outside which expiring budgets will not renew.
   Budgeted Amount Plan	Fixed: The budgeted amount is fixed for each reset period. Monthly/Quarterly: The amount is budgeted on a monthly or quarterly basis. Dynamic: The amount is automatically budgeted based on the configured baseline time range.
   Baseline Time Range	There are four options. See Baseline Time Range for details. Last quarter actual Current quarter forecast Last several quarters average Last several quarters compound growth rate
   Budgeted Usage	If Budgeted Amount Plan is Fixed, you just set a fixed value. If Reset Period is Daily or Yearly, you just set a fixed value. If Budgeted Amount Plan is Monthly or Quarterly, set budgeted amounts one by one. If the budgeted amount is not set for a period, the amount most recently entered will be applied. For example, if the budgeted amount is not set for May 2021, the budgeted amount of April 2021 will be used for May 2021. If Budgeted Amount Plan is Dynamic, you do not need to manually set budgeted amount. Because your dynamic budget depends on your cost data, your upcoming budget amounts can fluctuate as your costs change. We will notify all alert recipients when we adjust your budget amount on the 5th day of each month or quarter.
   Usage Scope (optional)	You can define a budget scope as required. Specifically, you can set filters such as Linked Account, Region, and Specifications on the left, and the usage data from the last 12 months will be displayed on the right. NOTE: If you are using a master account and want to create a budget for your member accounts, select these member accounts from Linked Account.

6. Configure alert thresholds, including Thresholds and Recipients, and click Next.

   Table 4 Parameters for creating a usage budget (2)

   Parameters	Description
   Thresholds	A maximum of five thresholds can be set for each budget. The following alerting conditions are supported: Actual cost >: If the actual cost reaches a certain amount or a certain percentage of a budgeted amount, an alert will be reported. Forecasted >: If the forecasted cost reaches a certain amount or a certain percentage of a budgeted amount, an alert will be reported. For details about how to create a forecast-based budget, see Creating a Forecasting-based Budget. The threshold value can be a certain amount or a certain percentage of a budgeted amount. Amount (USD): If the actual cost reaches a certain amount, an alert will be reported. (%) of budgeted amount: If the actual cost reaches a certain percentage of a budgeted amount, an alert will be reported.
   Recipients	Information of contacts who will receive alerts. If you want to add or modify recipient information, go to the Recipient Management page in the Message Center. Up to 10 recipients can be added for each budget.

7. Confirm your budget settings and click Save.

Alerts

• When the actual cost, usage, utilization, or coverage reaches the configured alert threshold, the system will notify the recipients by email or SMS.
• The recipients will receive the alerts within one hour. Each recipient can receive a maximum of 100 budget alerts a day. Plan your budget appropriately.
• Within a budget monitoring period, the alert is sent only once even if more than one configured thresholds are reached.

  Assume that you set the budgeted amount to $100 USD, and alert thresholds to 60%, 70%, and 80%. If the actual cost is $85 USD (85% of the budgeted amount), Huawei Cloud will send only an alert, informing recipients that the current cost exceeds 80% of the budgeted amount.

• An alert is sent only once for each threshold in a reset period.

  Assume that you set the reset period to Monthly, budgeted amount to $100 USD, and threshold to 80%. If the actual cost of the current month reaches $80 USD (80% of the budgeted amount), Huawei Cloud will report an alert.

  If the threshold of the current month is changed to 90%, the system will check costs based on the new threshold. If the actual cost of the current month reaches $90 USD (90% of the budgeted amount), the system will send an alert again.