Set up billing and usage alerts

Cost management is essential for sustainable observability operations. Grafana Cloud provides billing and usage alerts that notify you when consumption approaches or exceeds predefined thresholds, helping prevent unexpected charges and enabling proactive budget management.

Usage alerts monitor metrics such as active series, data points per minute, log volume, and trace spans. Setting appropriate thresholds helps you track consumption patterns and respond quickly to unusual spikes that might indicate configuration issues or increased system load.

1. In your Grafana Cloud instance, go to the Billing/Usage dashboard.

2. Create an alert:

   • For overall usage, go to the panel named Current Billable Usage Cost.
   • For product-level usage cost, go to one of the following panels:
     • Current Metrics Usage Cost
     • Current Logs Usage Cost
     • Current Traces Usage Cost.

3. Select the vertical ellipsis > More… > New alert rule.

4. Follow the instructions within the UI.

   1. Enter a name for your alert rule.

   2. In the Define query and alert condition section, set a value for Threshold.

      If you set a threshold to 10000 in the IS ABOVE field, the alert fires after your month-to-date billable usage has exceeded $10,000.

      Optionally, you can modify an alert query and condition. For more information, refer to Define query and condition.

5. In the Set evaluation behavior section, define how the alert is evaluated, and select the evaluation group to put it in.

   For more information, refer to Set alert evaluation behavior.

6. (Optional) In the Add annotations section, add annotations for your alert.

   Doing so provides a summary and description about what happened and what the alert rules does.

   For example:

   • Summary (optional): If the current situation continues, the cost threshold that you set will be exceeded.
   • Description (optional): Your usage consumption is currently higher than the alert threshold. To make sure that it’s not a result of very high cardinality or a misconfiguration, refer to the cardinality dashboard. Alternatively, revise your monthly budget.

   For more information, refer to Labels and annotations.

7. In the Configure notifications section, define how your notifications are to be routed.

   1. Add custom labels to change the way your notifications are routed.
   2. Preview the routing results.

   For more information, refer to Configure notifications.

8. In the upper right, click Save rule and exit.

Verify the alert configuration

To confirm your billing alert is configured correctly:

1. Navigate to Alerts & IRM > Alerting > Alert rules.

2. Find your billing alert in the list and verify its status shows as Normal or Pending.

3. Click on the alert rule name to review its configuration and ensure the threshold and notification settings are correct.

The billing alert is active and monitors your usage consumption. When usage exceeds the configured threshold, the alert triggers and sends notifications to help you manage costs proactively.

In the next milestone, you’ll discover additional learning journeys to expand your Grafana Cloud expertise.