Question

Difficulty: EasyAWS Cost Monitoring, Budgeting, and Optimization Tool Analysis

A company wants to receive an email notification when their monthly AWS charges are forecasted to exceed a specific budget threshold. Which AWS service should they configure to meet this requirement?

  1. AWS Budgets configured with a cost budget and notification threshold based on forecasted costsAnswer
  2. B
    AWS Cost Explorer configured to generate daily cost charts and historical spending reports
  3. C
    Compute Savings Plans configured to automatically limit and cap the spending on Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS instances
  4. D
    Amazon DynamoDB configured with Provisioned Capacity mode to throttle database operations when budget limits are breached

Answer

AWS Budgets configured with a cost budget and notification threshold based on forecasted costs
AWS Budgets is the correct service for proactive cost monitoring. It allows users to define custom cost budgets and set up automatic notifications (via email or Amazon SNS) when actual or forecasted spending exceeds a specified threshold.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Identify the primary requirement
The requirement is to proactively monitor monthly AWS charges and receive notifications when they are forecasted to exceed a defined limit.
This helps avoid unexpected overages before they actually occur.
2
Evaluate the capabilities of AWS Budgets
AWS Budgets supports setting up custom budgets based on cost, usage, RI, or Savings Plans, and can trigger SNS or email alerts based on actual or forecasted amounts.
This directly aligns with the requirement of proactive, forecast-based alerting.
3
Verify correct option and eliminate distractors
AWS Budgets is the correct choice, while other options either focus on retrospective reporting, pricing discount models, or database resource limits.
Ensures the chosen tool is fit-for-purpose and avoids common cost-monitoring misconceptions.

Key Concept

Proactive cost monitoring using AWS Budgets to alert on actual or forecasted cost thresholds.
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