Posted On: Oct 19, 2012

We are pleased to announce that billing alerts now support the individual accounts that are linked to a consolidated bill in your organization. These individual accounts can now use billing alerts to monitor their allocated charges and set up automated email alerts to be notified when charges reach a specified threshold. You may want to use billing alerts for linked accounts if developers or projects in your organization are responsible for managing their own budgets or reducing costs. You can set up your first billing alert from a linked account in minutes. To get started, visit the AWS billing console to enable monitoring of your charges, then set your first billing alert on your account's total AWS charges by specifying a bill threshold and an email address to notify. Once you do that, you will receive a subscription confirmation e-mail from AWS sent to each address that you provided. Click the confirmation link to complete setup. Your alert will then become active and you will receive a notification when charges exceed the threshold you chose. Within a few minutes, you will also be able to set additional billing alerts for the specific AWS services that you use.

If your organization’s paying account has already enabled monitoring, all linked account will be enabled automatically. Each linked account will be able to access only its own allocated charges, and paying accounts will continue to have access to all individual linked account charges in addition to the consolidated total. Each alert uses one Amazon CloudWatch alarm to monitor charges and one Amazon SNS topic to send the alert email, charged at standard rates. You can use up to 10 alarms and 1,000 e-mail notifications free each month as part of the AWS Free Tier, and most customers will be able to use billing alerts at no additional charge. To learn more about billing alerts, visit the billing alerts page or view Monitor Your Estimated Charges in the Amazon CloudWatch Developer Guide. To learn more about Consolidated Billing or to start using it, read the Consolidated Billing page. Sincerely,
The Amazon Web Services team