Budgets

Use budgets to set soft limits on your Oracle Cloud Infrastructure spending. You can set alerts on your budget to let you know when you might exceed your budget, and you can view all your budgets and spending from one single place in the Console.

For example, if you're running a single instance and want to monitor spending on it, you can create a budget on the compartment in which the instance is running. If you don't have any subcompartments in your tenancy, create a budget instead against the root compartment. For more information on creating budgets, see Creating a Budget.

How Budgets Work

Budgets are set on tags or on compartments (including the root compartment) to track all spending in a tag or for a compartment and its children.

All budget alerts are evaluated periodically every 24 hours. To see the last time that a budget was evaluated, open the details for a budget. You can view fields that show the current spend, the forecast, and the % Spent in period field that shows you the time period over which the budget was evaluated. When a budget alert is triggered, the email recipients configured in the budget alert receive an email.

Budget Concepts

The following concepts are essential to working with budgets:

BUDGET: You can set either a monthly recurring threshold, or a single non-recurring threshold that you define for your Oracle Cloud Infrastructure spending. Non-recurring budgets support date ranges longer than a month, up to a maximum of one year. Budgets are set on tags or compartments, and track all spending in the tag or compartment, and any child compartments.
Note

The budget tracks spending in the specified target compartment, but you need to have permissions to manage budgets in the root compartment of the tenancy to create and use budgets.
ALERT: You can define email alerts that get sent out for your budget. You can send a customized email message body with these alerts. Alerts are evaluated periodically every 24 hours, and can be triggered when your actual or forecasted spending hits either a percentage of your budget or a specified set amount.

Required IAM Policy

To use Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, you must be granted security access in a policy by an administrator. This access is required whether you're using the Console or the REST API with an SDK, CLI, or other tool. If you get a message that you don't have permission or are unauthorized, verify with your administrator what type of access you have and which compartment to work in.

If you're new to policies, see Getting Started with Policies and Common Policies.

To use budgets, you must be in a group that can use usage-budgets in the tenancy (which is the root compartment), or that can use all resources in the tenancy. All budgets are created in the root compartment, regardless of the compartment they're targeting, so IAM policies that grant budget permissions outside of the root aren't meaningful.

Accountants can inspect budgets including spend:

Allow group accountants to inspect usage-budgets in tenancy

Accountants can read budgets including spend (same as list):

Allow group accountants to read usage-budgets in tenancy

Accountants can create and edit budgets and alerts rules:

Allow group accountants to use usage-budgets in tenancy

Accountants can create, edit, and delete budgets and alerts rules:

Allow group accountants to manage usage-budgets in tenancy

Tagging Resources

Apply tags to your resources to help organize them according to your business needs. Apply tags at the time you create a resource, or update the resource later with the wanted tags. For general information about applying tags, see Resource Tags.

Authentication and Authorization

Each service in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure integrates with IAM for authentication and authorization, for all interfaces (the Console, SDK or CLI, and REST API).

An administrator in your organization needs to set up groups , compartments , and policies that control which users can access which services, which resources, and the type of access. For example, the policies control who can create new users, create and manage the cloud network, launch instances, create buckets, download objects, and so on. For more information, see Getting Started with Policies. For specific details about writing policies for each of the different services, see Policy Reference.

If you're a regular user (not an administrator) who needs to use the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure resources that your company owns, contact your administrator to set up a user ID for you. The administrator can confirm which compartment or compartments you should be using.

Creating Automation for Budgets Using the Events Service

You can create automation based on state changes for your Oracle Cloud Infrastructure resources by using event types, rules, and actions. For more information, see Overview of Events.