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You can (and should) set up an AWS CloudWatch alert on your account that will send you an email or SMS notification when your monthly bill exceeds a set threshold.

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I was surprised how incredibly difficult that is to set up. Eventually I dead-ended following the instructions when CloudWatch told me there were 0 metrics to choose from for monitoring...

Hi,

There are a couple of things that are easy to overlook when using billing metrics.

1. All billing metrics are stored in us-east-1 even for usages in other regions.

2. If you are using consolidated billing, billing metrics will be published under the linked account, and will only be visible to that account.

Hope that helps.

> 1. All billing metrics are stored in us-east-1 even for usages in other regions.

...what? Is this true? If so, can someone explain the logic behind this?

It's true, and probably means a set of instances in us-east-1 are the ones computing and storing billing costs for users.

Doing so allows customers to easily view the total estimated spend, rather than having to go to each region and add it up.

Yeah, I've done that now, but it's 'after the horse has bolted'

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