Manage budgets and notifications
To help you understand costs and manage spending on Elastic Cloud, you can create budgets that track resource usage and send email notifications when month-to-date usage reaches specified thresholds. Budgets can be scoped to specific Elastic Cloud resources or to your entire organization.
You can associate each budget with specific user roles in your organization. Users with those roles receive email notifications when budget alerts are triggered. You select the roles as part of the budget creation workflow described in the following section.
Credit consumption email notifications are separate from budget notifications and apply to organizations using prepaid credits. They are triggered automatically based on remaining credit balance and cannot be configured.
To create a budget:
Log in to Elastic Cloud and go to Billing > Budgets and notifications.
Select Add budget.
In the Scope step, choose how the budget is applied:
- Organization: Tracks usage for your entire Elastic Cloud organization, including resources you create later.
- Cloud resource: Tracks usage only for the selected resources, such as Elastic Cloud Hosted deployments, Serverless projects, or connected clusters. In the selector, resources are grouped by type (for example, Cloud Hosted, Serverless, and Cloud Connect), and you can select more than one.
In the Configuration step, specify your budget details:
- Give your budget a Name.
- Review the Time range: budgets are always Monthly, and usage resets on the first day of each calendar month.
- Enter a Target amount (ECU) in Elastic Consumption Units. A cost trend chart shown next to the form summarizes historical usage for your chosen scope over the last six months so you can compare it to your target.
In the Alerts step, configure when and who to notify:
Notification thresholds
Alert emails use fixed thresholds:
- A warning email is sent when usage for the selected scope reaches 75% of the specified target.
- An overage email is sent when usage reaches 100% of the specified target.
Recipients
Select which user roles should receive alert notifications. You must choose at least one option:
- Elastic Cloud organization: Organization owner and/or Billing admin.
- Cloud resource permissions (only for cloud-resource budgets): Users with Admin, Editor, or Viewer roles on the selected resources. If the budget includes multiple resources, users must have the selected roles on all of them to receive notifications.
Select Create budget.
New budgets are active by default, so notifications are on after you create them. To stop or resume emails for a budget, open Budgets and notifications, find the budget in the table, and choose Deactivate or Activate under Actions.
After creating a budget, you can return to Budgets and notifications to view or edit it, check Current vs Budgeted (ECU) for its scope, and expand cloud-resource budgets to review usage per resource in the subtable.
If you edit a budget scoped to cloud resources, resources that no longer exist are removed from the selectable list and shown in a callout.
Credit consumption alerts are sent when your organization has used a certain percentage of available credits. These alerts are set automatically and can't be configured.
Alerts are triggered to be sent when your credit consumption reaches one of the set thresholds: 33%, 25%, 16%, and 0% of active credits remaining.