Question

Your finance team wants to be notified whenever the actual (not forecasted) spend on a specific project reaches 50%, 90%, and 100% of a monthly cost target. They also require that the alert email is sent to a Pub/Sub topic so a custom internal system can react programmatically. As the Associate Cloud Engineer, what should you configure to meet these requirements?

Accepted Answer

Create a budget scoped to the project, set threshold rules at 50%, 90%, and 100% of actual spend, and connect the budget to a Pub/Sub topic for programmatic notifications.

Answer

Create a Cloud Monitoring alerting policy on the billing account metric with thresholds at 50%, 90%, and 100%, using a Pub/Sub notification channel.

Answer

Create a budget scoped to the billing account, set a single 100% threshold on forecasted spend, and enable email notifications to the finance team.

Answer

Configure a billing export to BigQuery and schedule a query that publishes to Pub/Sub when spend crosses each threshold.