I’m trying to set up a daily budget alert mechanism in Google Cloud Platform (GCP), but according to the official documentation, budget alerts can only be triggered on a monthly, quarterly, or yearly basis. My use case requires more granular monitoring—specifically, I want to receive an alert whenever my spend crosses a certain threshold, such as $500, at any point during the day. For example, if my spend is $300 at 3 PM and increases to $500 by 5 PM, I need an alert at that moment. This should happen every day, and not just once per billing cycle. However, I can’t find a way to configure GCP budgets to trigger alerts multiple times per day or on a daily recurring basis. Is there any supported method—or even a recommended workaround that allows for real-time or daily budget threshold alerts in GCP?
Hello @shivaram,
I believe you’re referring to setting up programmatic notifications as mentioned in the “Click Finish to save the budget” section where the doc says:
If you set the optional programmatic notifications to trigger a programmatic action, budget notifications are sent to the connected Pub/Sub topic multiple times per day with the current status of your budget. This is a different cadence than budget alert emails, which are sent only when a budget threshold is met.
But keep in mind that:
There’s a delay between incurring costs and receiving budget notifications, so you might incur additional costs for usage that hasn’t arrived at the time that all services are stopped. Following the steps in this example doesn’t guarantee that you won’t spend more than your budget. If you have a limited amount of funds, set your maximum budget below your available funds to account for billing delays. (source)