Hands-On: Setting Up Billing Alerts and Budgets

Overview¶

In this hands-on session, we will set up a GCP billing budget and alert so you are notified before you overspend your credits. We will also use the GCP Pricing Calculator to estimate the cost of the experiments we ran in the previous hands-on sessions.

Learning Objectives¶

By the end of this session, you will be able to:

• Set up a billing budget and alert in GCP

• Use the GCP Pricing Calculator to estimate experiment costs

• Understand the cost breakdown of the resources used in this tutorial

Step 1: Open the Billing Console¶

1. Go to console.cloud.google.com

2. In the top left, click the navigation menu

3. Click Billing

Step 2: Create a Budget¶

In the left sidebar, click Budgets and alerts, then click Create budget to create a new budget.

To create a budget, we need to set up the scope (which projects and services to monitor), the amount (the total budget limit), and the actions (how you want to be notified when you hit your limit).

Scope:

• Enter a name for the budget, for example gcp-aims-tutorial-budget

• Under Time range, leave it as Monthly

• Under Projects, make sure your project is selected

• Leave all services selected so the budget covers all GCP services

• Click Next

Amount

• Under Budget type, select Specified amount

• Enter your target amount i.e. $10.

  • Note for AIMS students: While your total allocation might be $2,000, setting a low monthly target like $10 or $20 helps you catch accidental “resource leaks” early.

• Click Next

Actions

• By default, Google Cloud creates three alert thresholds at 50%, 90%, and 100% of your budget. Keep these defaults:

  • 50%: Acts as an early warning that your experiment is halfway through its monthly allowance.

  • 90%: Serves as a critical “wrap up” signal to finish your runs.

  • 100%: Notifies you that you have fully reached your limit.

• Under Manage Notifications, make sure the box “Email alerts to billing admins and users” is checked. This ensures you receive an immediate email notification the moment a threshold is crossed.

• Click Finish to finally create the budget.

Step 3: Verify the Budget¶

You should not see the budget listed on the Budget and alerts page with the spend progress bar and configured thresholds.

You will receive an email notification when your spending reaches 50%, 90%, and 100% of the budget amount.

🔑 Key Takeaways¶

• Always set up billing budget and alert before running experiments, not after.

• GCP billing alerts notify you but do not stop your resources automatically. Manual cleanup of resources is always required.

• The biggest cost driver is usually GPU compute time. Always delete VMs and runtimes when you are done.

• Job-based compute like Vertex AI Custom Training is almost always cheaper than always-on VMs for batch training since it terminates automatically when done.

📚 References and Further Reading¶

• GCP Billing Documentation - Official documentation on managing billing and budgets

• GCP Pricing Calculator - Estimate costs for any GCP service before running experiments

• Compute Engine Pricing - Full pricing breakdown for GPU VM instances

• Vertex AI Pricing - Full pricing breakdown for Vertex AI training and serving

• GCS Pricing - Storage and data transfer pricing for Google Cloud Storage