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Cloud costs change daily, and waiting for the monthly invoice to spot problems means you’re always reacting too late. Alerts monitor your spend continuously and notify you through Slack, Microsoft Teams, or email when costs cross the thresholds you define.
Costory alerts dashboard summary

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Prerequisites

  • At least one cloud provider (AWS, GCP, or Azure) connected to Costory
  • A notification channel configured (Slack, Microsoft Teams, or email)

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Overview

Costory evaluates your cloud spend every day (or twice a day depending on your plan) across AWS, GCP, and Azure. You define what to watch, the threshold that matters, and where to send the notification. Costory handles the rest. Where alerts fit in your day-to-day:
  • Catching a cost spike in a specific service before it compounds over the full billing period
  • Tracking team-level budgets with automatic notifications when a team approaches or exceeds its target
  • Monitoring commitment coverage (, ) to avoid paying on-demand rates unnecessarily
  • Watching custom ratios like marginal cost per user or savings plan utilization

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Key terms used in this article

  • Lookback window: The number of days of cost data included in each evaluation. Costory uses a 4-day window, starting at least 48 hours in the past to ensure final cost data is available.
  • : Custom groupings that let you scope alerts to teams, products, or environments, regardless of how resources are tagged in the cloud provider.
See the Glossary for a full list of terms.

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Setting up an alert

1

Navigate to Alerts

Go to Alerts in the Costory app. You’ll see all your existing alerts in one place.
2

Create a new alert

Click Create Alert. Choose from a pre-built template for common alert types or configure your own custom logic.
Create a new alert from a list of predefined templates
3

Set evaluation criteria

Choose the scope and threshold for the alert:
  • Which , service, tag, or cloud provider to watch
  • The threshold amount or formula
  • The time window: daily, 7-day rolling, or month-to-date
Set evaluation criteria
4

Configure notifications

Select where to send alerts (Slack, Microsoft Teams, or email), who should receive them, and the notification frequency.
5

Save and activate

Your alert appears in the summary view and begins evaluating data after the next data refresh.

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Alert types

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Cost alerts

Cost alerts track actual spending against a threshold you define. You can set a fixed dollar amount, a percentage change compared to a previous period, or a custom formula based on usage metrics, business metrics, or ratios. Multi-threshold severity levels (Info, Warning, Alert) let you escalate notifications based on how far costs have deviated. Evaluation periods can be daily, weekly, or monthly. Use custom formulas for advanced use cases: Savings Plan coverage ratios, marginal cost limits, or cost-per-transaction thresholds. See the example below for a walkthrough.

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Budget alerts

Budget alerts track spend against allocated with percentage-based triggers. When a team approaches or exceeds its target, Costory notifies the budget owner and each budget line owner automatically. Weekly cumulative sums let you track running totals over the current week, so you can catch budget overruns before the month closes. For a full walkthrough of setting up per-team budgets with automated alerts, see the Automate Cloud Budgets guide.

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Example: Savings Plan coverage alert

Savings Plan coverage alert
reduce your on-demand costs, but only when they actually cover your usage. If coverage drops, you’re paying full price for compute that should be discounted. A coverage alert catches this early. To set one up, create a cost alert with a custom formula that computes the ratio of covered spend to total eligible spend. For example: 
savings_plan_covered_cost / (savings_plan_covered_cost + savings_plan_uncovered_cost)
Set a threshold at the coverage percentage you want to maintain (e.g., alert when coverage drops below 80%). Use a 7-day rolling window to smooth out daily fluctuations. This same approach works for other ratio-based alerts. You can divide infrastructure cost by active user count (from an external usage metric) to track marginal cost per user and alert when it rises above a target. Or compare against on-demand cost to monitor how much your commitments are saving over time.

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How alerts are evaluated

Alerts evaluate cost data with a built-in delay to ensure accuracy.
ParameterValue
Evaluation frequencyEvery day, or twice a day depending on your plan
Data delayAt least 48 hours (cloud providers finalize billing data with a delay)
Lookback window4 days
For example, if today is January 15, the alert evaluates spend from January 9 to 13 (a 4-day window, starting 48 hours before today).
Costory does not evaluate the most recent 48 hours because cloud providers (especially AWS) can revise billing data during that window. This avoids false positives from incomplete data.

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Managing alerts

From the alerts summary page, you can snooze an alert to temporarily pause notifications during a planned migration or expected cost spike. Snoozed alerts stop sending notifications but continue evaluating in the background, so you can review what happened when you un-snooze. You can also delete an alert you no longer need, which removes the alert and its history permanently. When an alert fires, the notification you receive in Slack, Teams, or email includes a direct link to the pre-filtered to the exact scope of the alert. Click View in Explorer to investigate the cost change immediately, without recreating filters manually.

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Tips for effective alerting

Start with a few broad alerts (total spend cap, largest service) and add granular ones as you identify the areas that need attention. Pair alerts with Feature Engineering to ensure spend is accurately labeled, and use Virtual Dimensions for team-level or product-level targeting.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Costory evaluates alerts every day, or twice a day depending on your plan. Data is checked with at least a 48-hour delay to ensure billing data from your cloud provider is finalized.
Yes. Cost alerts support multi-threshold severity levels (Info, Warning, Alert), so you can receive an informational notification at one threshold and escalate to a warning or critical alert at a higher one.
Snoozed alerts stop sending notifications but continue evaluating cost data in the background. When you un-snooze, you can review any threshold breaches that occurred while the alert was paused.
Yes. You can define custom formulas using any cost metric available in Costory. Common examples include Savings Plan coverage ratios, marginal cost per user, and cost-per-transaction thresholds.
Alerts can be delivered to Slack, Microsoft Teams, or email. Each alert notification includes a direct link to the Cost Explorer pre-filtered to the scope of the alert.

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Next Steps

Automate Cloud Budgets

Define per-team budgets and get notified when teams exceed targets

Digest

Auto-triage cost anomalies with AI-generated incident reports

Slack Reports

Send recurring cost snapshots to your team’s channels

Cost Explorer

Drill into specific cost changes with full context

Virtual Dimensions

Create team-level and product-level cost groupings for targeted alerts

Feature Engineering

Clean up billing labels so alerts target the right resources
Last modified on March 18, 2026