Within this blog, I will show you how to Prevent unexpected high Azure spending by setting Budgets and Cost Alerts within your Azure Subscription. Within this setup, you will be looking at how to setup budgets for specific scopes within your subscription along with setting up alerts to notify you when you are close to your budget!
Along with the alerting; you will also be able to see a dashboard to help you proactively manage costs and review your current-set budget(s) allowing you to monitor how the Azure spending is progressing over time.
I will show you an example on how to set a budget/cost alert(s), do note that none of the resources in any of the budget scopes are affected when the threshold you create has been exceeded, only an alert will be triggered
Time to configure
Within your Subscription, select Cost Management + Billing
This now brings you into the Cost Management Overview of the subscription, you will see under Cost Management both Cost Alerts & Budgets
Cost Alerts, shows the cost alerts already in this subscription; currently I have none set, lets create a budget.
Select Budgets -> Add to create a new budget
For my budgeting example, my scope will be the subscription (Your scope can be as granular as you require and can have multiple budgets set)
Name:- Name of Budget
Reset Period:- This determines the budgets reset period, depending on what you require set
Creation date:- When alert is created
Expiration date:- When alert will expire
Amount:- Set the Amount you want to be alerted on when threshold is met
In next screen, you set alert conditions; once triggered it flows to an Action Group, I have a blog here on What are Action Groups.
Please note, once activated – it does take a few hours before it begins to function correctly
The above shows the budgets dashboard; as mentioned you can created various budgets for numerous scopes.
Setting budget alerts will definitely assist you in relation to your Azure Spend and a highly recommended Azure Cost Saving tip to help prevent unexpected Azure spending
Thomas Thornton - Microsoft Azure MVP - HashiCorp Ambassador 
Indeed, thinking about budget and setting up alerts is essential for proper Azure cost management. Companies not focusing on this from the outset end up finding themselves in ever-increasing cost and panic sets in if unintentional expensive resources (by mistake or automation) are created magnifying the cost suddenly.
That said, the budget alerts feature in Azure have some serious issues such as:
* Instead of a % of budget, what we really need is to be alerted anytime we’re above a budgeted pace we specify. With current functionality, I now set a bunch of % limits and I’m frequently getting alerted for no reason during the month; as after I do the math, we are within the budget pace.
* If someone creates a resource expensive than what we permit, I should get alerted instantly. It could be a mistake but it ends up being a costly one if the resource isn’t scaled-down soon.
At CloudAlarm, we’re trying to solve these problems so individuals and companies can get instant alerts and save from horrifying spend they didn’t intend.
Thank you for creating awareness with this post!