CloudAlarm is in beta; however, it doesn't mean that you're getting an inferior quality product. An important purpose behind keeping it in beta is to learn from customers their use cases for alarms and incorporate them into the service, without customers requiring to commit on a payment plan.
Feel free to send us details at [email protected].
Before you can connect an Azure subscription, you need to install the CloudAlarm Azure App into the Azure Active Directory (AD) tenant which holds that subscription.
Upon successful app installation, you're taken to step two wherein you need to grant read-only access to one or more Azure subscriptions inside the same AAD tenant, to the CloudAlarm app.
Presently, three alarm types are supported: budget, new resource and
delete resource. Alarms related to scaling up/down existing resources is planned.
If you have a need for any other kind of alarm, feel free to send us details at
[email protected].
The budget alarms let you monitor spending at the level of subscription/resource group and raise alerts if your daily spend is estimated to exceed your expected monthly budget. Azure also does something similar with budget alerts but there's a key difference.
Azure requires you to specify a threshold value – a percentage of the budget – and triggers an alert only when your consumption hits that value. For instance, suppose you set a budget of $1000 and a threshold value as 50%. Now suppose that someone creates a resource accidentally with a wrong tier – say an expensive SQL database – that has a cost of $50 per day while the need and approval was for a $1 per day tier. You also have other resources costing $30 per day so total cost is now $80 per day.
With Azure budget actual-based alerts, you'll likely get notified on the 8th day by which time you have consumed 50% ($560) of your budget, of which $350 is the cost of that database alone instead of $7.
With Azure budget forecast-based alerts, you'll still get notified after a few days again when you've consumed 50% of your budget as per the forecasted cost for the month. We're not privy to the exact algorithm that calculates forecast cost, but in either case the important point is that you need to have consumed a threshold or percentage of your budget amount before you get notified.
With CloudAlarm, you don't need to specify a threshold value. You only specify what's your expected monthly budget and CloudAlarm does the following on every day:
For the same scenario of $80 being spent per day discussed previously, following the above calculation method, CloudAlarm will alert you on the 2nd day itself by which time you've spent only $50 (instead of $350 as in case of Azure budget alerts) on the wrong tier of SQL database.
CloudAlarm has to wait for a day because Azure doesn't provide a way to know the actual cost for a given resource, until that resource has been consumed for a day. However, with new resource alarm you can even bypass this limitation by setting up alarms to notify you if a resource is created in tiers you don't expect to use. resource alarms are run every few minutes so you'll not even consume few dollars for the same database scenario and you'll get notified of the mistake. You can immediately amend the tier and literally save yourself almost the entire cost – and a charge of $2 or so for an hour would be the cost incurred instead of hundreds of dollars if you had relied on Azure budget alerts.
Budget alarm relies on Azure's usage details API to know the cost for resources in your subscription. At the moment we don't use retail pricing API for this purpose because the actual cost can vary due to discounts and other reasons from retail pricing. The usage API gives consumption data only up to the prior day so there's no direct way to get the actual cost of resources created today. Azure budget alerts also rely on the same API as far as we know.
At a high-level, following is the process a budget alarm goes through:
Make sure you have connected the subscription for which you want to create a budget alarm. Then, follow these steps:
An alarm email is sent to the owner's email address as well as to all the team users who have access to the associated subscription.
At the moment budget alarm notification, if raised, would arrive in your inbox after 08:00 AM as per the selected timezone for the subscription (which defaults to the timezone as per your profile). You can change this timezone on the Subscriptions page. Reason for this schedule is to have an alert email (if any), be as close as possible to the top of your inbox when you start work so you can notice and take action to prevent unexpected spending immediately.
No, a budget alarm is only evaluated once per day as mentioned in QA How does budget alarm work? At the moment any change in the alarm (including budget amount) is considered only during the next evaluation.
Make sure you have connected the subscription for which you want to create a new resource alarm. Then, follow these steps:
An alarm email is sent to the owner's email address as well as to all the team users who have access to the associated subscription.
Make sure you have connected the subscription for which you want to create a delete resource alarm. Then, follow these steps:
An alarm email is sent to the team users email address as well as to all the team users who have access to the associated subscription.
Resource alarms are usually evaluated every five minutes as of this writing. This means that if the resource is fully created on Azure by 10:00 AM, and if a new resource alarm is setup to monitor such a resource creation, you should get an alert within next 5-6 minutes. However, there could be a delay in case we're experiencing heavy activity in the jobs that evaluate these alarms.
Businesses and organizations get team feature to setup additional users and delegate alarm management to them. As an admin you can add, remove or suspend users of your team, change their password or even block password (require user to reset password to login). Built based on ASPSecurityKit's user management source package feature.
Yes, users with delegated rights on a subscription will also receive all alerts related to alarms for that subscription, regardless of whether or not such alarms were created by them.