Documentation Grafana Cloud Cost Management and Billing Create usage alerts Create usage and cost alerts

Create usage and cost alerts

Create usage and cost alerts to maintain control over your observability spending by receiving notifications when usage or costs approach predefined thresholds. This proactive approach prevents unexpected billing surprises and helps optimize your Grafana Cloud investment.

Before you begin

To create alerts, you must have the permissions granted by the Usage alerts admin role.

Create a usage alert

Usage alerts monitor data ingestion rates and notify you when consumption exceeds expected levels.

To create a usage alert, complete the following steps:

1. Sign in to your Grafana Cloud instance.
2. Navigate to Cost Management and Billing.
3. Click Usage Alerts tab in the top navigation menu.
4. Click + Create usage alerts if no alert exists yet, or click + Create new alert from the list view.
5. In the Product drop-down, select the product you want to monitor.
6. Set the monthly threshold:
   • For Global Spend enter your planned monthly budget in United States dollars (USD)
   • For Metrics, Logs, or Traces, enter your planned monthly usage threshold (for example, 4000 for metrics billable series or 1 GiB for logs)
7. In the Select alert levels section, select one or more suggested thresholds (for example, 50%, 70%, or 85% of your budget). You can also enter a custom percentage
8. From the Contact point drop-down, select where alert notifications should be sent. If you haven’t set up a contact point, click View or create contact points to configure one
9. Click Create alerts to save your new usage alert

The alert becomes active immediately and begins monitoring your specified usage metrics.

Properly configured alerts help you maintain budget control and prevent unexpected costs in your Grafana Cloud environment.

Create a cost attribution-based usage alert

You can configure usage alerts based on your cost attribution configuration to monitor usage and costs for teams, services, departments, or systems. When both primary and secondary attribution labels are configured, you can combine how each label is filtered in a single alert.

Prerequisites

Before creating a cost attribution-based alert, ensure that you have:

• Configured cost attribution labels in your Grafana Cloud stack
• Attribution data available for the labels you want to monitor

Create an alert based on cost attribution

To create a usage alert based on your cost attribution configuration, complete the following steps.

1. Sign in to your Grafana Cloud instance.
2. Navigate to Cost Management and Billing.
3. Click Usage Alerts tab in the top navigation menu.
4. Click + Create usage alerts if no alert exists yet, or click + Create new alert from the list view.
5. At the top of the drawer, select Attributed usage as the type of alert.
6. In the Product drop-down, select the product you want to monitor.
7. Configure how each configured attribution label applies to the alert. When cost attribution includes both a primary and a secondary label, controls for both labels appear so you can combine them in one alert. If you configured only one attribution label, only that label’s control appears. For each label that has a control, choose one option:
   • No filter: Do not aggregate or filter on this label.
   • __missing__: Monitor unattributed usage for this label (telemetry that does not include the label).
   • Group by all values: Use one monthly threshold for all values of this label; the alert fires when any value exceeds the threshold.
   • A specific value: Select a single label value from the list (for example, one team or service). You can select only one such value per label.
8. Set the monthly threshold:
   • For Metrics, Logs, or Traces, enter your planned monthly usage threshold
   • How this threshold applies depends on your label selections (for example, a single value, all values with Group by all values, or __missing__)
9. In the Select alert levels section, select one or more suggested thresholds (for example, 50%, 70%, or 85% of your budget). You can also enter a custom percentage
10. From the Contact point drop-down, select where alert notifications should be sent. If you haven’t set up a contact point, click View or create contact points to configure one
11. Click Create alerts to save your new cost attribution-based usage alert

How the alert evaluates usage depends on the combination of options you chose for each label:

• No filter on a label omits that label from the alert’s grouping so the rule does not filter series by it.
• __missing__ targets unattributed data for that label.
• Group by all values applies one threshold across all values of that label; firing when any value crosses the threshold (for example, a Prometheus-style sum by (label) over attributed series).
• A specific value restricts the alert to that single value for that label.

You can mix these per label (for example, Group by all values on one label and No filter on the other) to match how you want to slice attributed usage. Notifications still go to the contact point you selected.