Vantage Launches Custom Cost Alerts: Define Alerts for Any Filterable Value

Today, Vantage is launching Cost Alerts, allowing customers to use business logic to define the exact parameters they want to be notified of for their infrastructure costs. Vantage customers can now automate the detection and alerting of changes in cost, either by percentage or static value, for any value in a Cost Report in Vantage over configurable periods, such as day over day, week over week, month over month, or quarter over quarter.

Vantage customers use existing alerting, such as Cost Anomaly Alerts and Budget Alerts to stay informed on their usage without having to log in to Vantage. These alerts also serve as summaries to customers within the Vantage console to understand usage trends. While teams heavily rely on these alerts to stay informed on costs, often times teams want to be made aware of trends or changes in usage that aren’t anomalous in nature, do not cause budget overruns, or are evaluated over configurable periods of time.

Cost Alert annotation in a Cost Report

Now, with the launch of Cost Alerts, customers can define an alert for increases in cost, based on percentage increases or value increases over configurable periods of time. Customers can apply these rules to a single report or multiple reports, and the alert will evaluate each binned group within the report. This allows customers to detect changes in any “group by” dimension in Vantage, such as change in cost by Service, Region, Account, Resource, or Subcategory. For example, customers can use a Cost Report scoped to the costs of an application and grouped by Service, and Vantage will notify users based on changes to costs of individual services for that application. In addition to receiving notifications, Vantage will automatically add an annotation of the Cost Alert on the Cost Report, when it occurs, for visibility by any user with access to the Cost Report. Users can view and edit all Cost Alerts that have been configured on the Notifications page.

Cost Alerts are now available to all users, including users in the free tier. To get started, see the product documentation.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. What is being launched today?

Vantage is launching Cost Alerts, which allows customers to create notifications for increases in spend, either percentage based or amount based, over configurable periods, such as day over day, week over week, month over month, or quarter over quarter.

2. Who is the customer?

The customer is any Vantage user who wants to automate the detection of costs that may signal attention is required by engineering or FinOps teams.

3. How much does this cost?

There is no additional cost for using Cost Alerts. It is included in the cost of the Vantage subscription, including users in the free tier.

4. How do I set up a Cost Alert?

Cost Alerts can be created in two ways—either directly from a Cost Report or via the Notifications page.

• From a Cost Report: From the top right of the report, click the ellipses button (…), then select Create Cost Alert.
• From the Notifications page: From the top right of the console, select the bell icon. The Cost Alerts dashboard is displayed. Click Configure Cost Alert.

You will then be prompted to define the following characteristics:

• Cost Alert Title
• Cost Change Threshold (choose between percentage or currency change, then the value)
• Comparison Interval
• Cost Reports to detect cost changes for
• Notification methods (e.g., Slack, MS Teams, email, or Jira)

5. Where can I view the Cost Alerts that are set up for my Cost Report?

To see Cost Alerts for a specific Cost Report, from the top of the Vantage console, click the bell icon to open the Notification Center. All configured alerts are listed along with their corresponding Cost Report.

6. Where can I view the notifications that have triggered?

When a Cost Alert is triggered, Vantage will create an annotation with information about the alert in the Cost Report it occurs in, in addition to any configured notifications.

7. What comparison intervals can I set up alerts for?

You can create alerts based off of the following evaluation periods:

• Day over day
• Week over week (Sunday to Saturday)
• Month over month (First of the month to last day of the month)
• Quarter over quarter (based on standard Calendar Quarter)

All timestamps of costs are in UTC.

8. Can I be alerted if costs decrease?

At this time, you can only be notified of cost increases.

9. What methods can I receive notifications by?

You can receive notifications via email, Slack, Microsoft Teams, or Jira issues.

10. How many Cost Reports can I assign a Cost Alert to?

At this time, you can assign a Cost Alert to up to 10 Cost Reports. If you would like to assign alerts to more Cost Reports, please reach out to support@vantage.sh.

11. At what time do I receive Cost Alerts?

Notifications are delivered as soon as Vantage updates the data for the Cost Report associated with your Cost Alert.

12. Is there API and Terraform support for Cost Alerts?

Yes. API and Terraform support will be available April 17.

13. What happens when my provider updates billing information for past usage?

If your cost data gets updated retroactively by a cloud provider, and it meets one of your alert criteria, it may cause retroactive alerts to be created. If an alert has already been created, and retroactive cost data causes the alert to no longer be valid, Vantage will persist the annotation in the Cost Report, but you may delete it if you want.

14. What will I be alerted on if my report is not grouped?

If your report is ungrouped, your Cost Alerts will index on Provider and Service groupings.

15. What happens if I delete a Cost Alert? Or what happens if I remove a Cost Report from a Cost Alert?

If you delete a Cost Alert or remove a Cost Report from it, any annotations linked to that alert will also be removed from the affected Cost Reports.

16. Will I be alerted if a new grouping appears in my Cost Report?

You will be alerted for new groupings in your Cost Report for any dollar-based Cost Alerts. You will not be alerted for new groupings for percent-based Cost Alerts.