1. Managing and Monitoring Oracle Cloud
  2. Monitor Your Billing Data
  3. Monitor Your Usage and Costs in a Universal Credits Account
  4. Set an Alert for Your Account Balance

Set an Alert for Your Account Balance

You can monitor your account balance in your cloud account by generating alerts. This helps you determine whether to increase your account balance or continue with your purchased amount. The account balance is monitored vis-a-vis a defined usage limit (amount value).

You can configure rules to generate alerts when the account balance of metered services category reaches or exceeds the specified usage limit. If a soft limit is set, users are allowed to exceed the amount up to a system-defined value. If a hard limit is set, then a quota breach occurs when the specified limit is reached. When a quota breach occurs, you must increase your account balance to continue to use the services.
To create alert rules, do the following:
  1. Sign in to Infrastructure Classic Console.
  2. Select a service and click the service name to open the details page for the service.
    The Overview page is in focus.
  3. Click the Billing Alerts tab. Alert rules, if any, are listed in the Alert Rules section. The Billing Alerts tab is displayed based on the account type and user role. You can set alerts only for services that support it and only if you’re a Cloud Account Administrator or a Service Administrator.
  4. In the Alert Rules section, click Create.
  5. In the Create Alert Rule dialog box, specify the following:
    1. Channel: Email. This is selected by default and is read-only.
    2. Service Category Name: Displays the subscription category (for example, Oracle IaaS and PaaS Cloud Services) that this service belongs to and is read-only. Note that you can only set an alert at the category level, not at the service level.
    3. Limit Type: Specify one of the following:

      • Soft Limit: You’ll get an alert when the usage limit is reached, but you can still continue to use the resources.

      • Hard Limit: You’ll get an alert when the usage limit is reached and a quota breach occurs. You can’t create new instances as the service becomes suspended, however, you can still continue to use existing services or instances. You can specify only one hard limit alert rule for the purchased amount.

    4. Value Type: Select either Absolute or Percentage. You can’t specify Percentage for Pay-As-You-Go subscriptions.
    5. Usage Limit: Specify the usage limit. Limit value can’t be more than what is allowed by the system depending on whether it’s an absolute value or a percentage. You’ll get an alert when the resource usage reaches this value. The limit must be greater than or equal to 1. For Universal Credit subscriptions, the overage value is the cumulated amount of all services in the order from the date of purchase, and is displayed below this field.
    6. Click Done.

Example 5-1 Configuring an Alert Rule to Monitor Account Balance

If you specify the following criteria to monitor the account balance:

  • Your purchased amount =100 USD

  • Limit Type = Soft Limit

  • Usage Limit = 50 USD , limit value can’t exceed more than 2 times the purchased amount per system configuration

Then, an alert is generated when you have used 50 USD, but you are still allowed to create instances up to 200 USD (2 times the purchased amount), because you specified a soft limit. If you specify a hard limit of 200 USD, then a quota breach occurs and you aren’t allowed to create any more instances until you increase your account balance.