Budgets
Dynatrace Platform Subscriptions only
The Budgets feature tracks and notifies you when your Dynatrace Platform Subscription costs reach pre-defined thresholds. You can use Budgets at the account, environment, and capability levels and configure email notifications, notifying you when your budget thresholds are exceeded. Examples of supported use cases include:
- Receive notifications when your Dynatrace Platform Subscription reaches 75%, 90%, and 100% of your annual commitment.
- Set a lower budget threshold (for example, 10% of total subscription costs) for a lower-priority "sandbox” environment.
- Set a fixed threshold for a new capability (for example, USD $1,000) and receive a notification when this threshold is reached.
Budgets complement cost monitors by allowing you to define custom thresholds at the environment and capability levels. Cost monitors detect variations in forecasts and unexpected cost increases.
Best practices for budgets
A Dynatrace Platform Subscription automatically enables three initial budget thresholds that notify license administrators when total account level consumption reaches 75%, 90%, and 100% of the annual commitment.
By default, all users with the View and manage account and billing information account permission are notified when a budget is exceeded, ensuring that license administrators are notified without having to configure settings. These thresholds can be adjusted to suit your needs, and the email distribution list should be customized in notification settings to ensure that the appropriate users are informed.
Budgets run in parallel with Dynatrace cost monitors, providing user-defined notifications when cost thresholds are reached and notifications when unexpected changes in forecast and costs are detected.
Managing Budgets
You can view and manage Budgets at Account Management > Subscription > Cost management > Budgets. Cost management is also accessible from the Account Management Notification center page (available only to Dynatrace-license administrators.)
The Budget summary page shows all active budgets defined for your account. Three default budgets are enabled to tell you when your total DPS consumption reaches 75%, 90%, and 100%. You can modify these defaults and manage up to 20 active budgets in Account Management. Each defined budget is displayed as a card on the Budgets tab, showing the budget name, threshold-progress bar, configuration options, and % of threshold consumed.
Threshold bars for budgets that have not been reached are displayed in blue; brown threshold bars indicate that consumption has reached 75% of the threshold; red bars indicate that 100% of the threshold has been reached. When this occurs, a budget event is triggered, which administrators can view in the Account Management Notification center, and an email is sent to all Dynatrace license administrators or your user-defined list of email-notification recipients.
Creating and editing budgets
Select a budget from the Budgets summary page to view and change its settings, or select + Budget to create a new budget. Only users with the View and manage account and billing information account permission can create and change settings. Each budget requires the following information:
- Name: Used to identify the budget in the Account Management portal and any notification email.
- Monitored environment: You can define a budget across all environments or for specific environments. Select the environments that the Budget applies to.
- Monitored capabilities: You can define a budget across all capabilities or for one or multiple capabilities. Select the capabilities that the budget applies to.
- Threshold type: Can be a fixed value or expressed as a % of the annual DPS commitment.
- Email notification details: Each budget defines a list of email addresses to send notifications to when the budget is exceeded:
- Notify license administrators sends notifications to all users with the permission: View and manage account and billing information account permission.
- To identify users with this permission, select People from the Identity & Access Management menu option, and select Account level scope and View and manage account and billing information to filter the list of users with this specific permission.
- Send email to additional users on this account allows you to specify other email addresses of users that should receive budget notifications. Notification emails contain a link to Account Management, so recipients need the View account access permission.
- Subject: Used in the email subject line.
- Message: Used in the email description.
Each budget card provides the following options:
- Select Explore cost and usage to open Capability details with the environment and capabilities selected.
- Select Delete to remove an expired budget.
Budget notifications
Budgets are evaluated each day at 12:00:00 UTC.
When a new budget is initially created, the budget card displays the message: We’re creating your budget. Check back later to see cost data. and a gray status bar.
When costs equal or exceed the defined threshold for the selected environments and capabilities, an email is sent to the users identified in the budget definition. An email is sent only once on the day that the threshold is exceeded.
When multiple budgets are exceeded simultaneously, a user will receive one email for each exceeded budget.
Budget emails are sent from the email address no-reply@dynatrace.com.
Select View your account in any email notification to go to the Account Management Notification Center.
Budget events and emails are only triggered when costs exceed a user-defined threshold. If you define a threshold that is already exceeded, no budget event will be triggered and no email notification will be sent.
Notification center
The Notification Center provides a history of all budget events and other events tracked by Account Management. Access the Notification Center by selecting Notifications (alarm bell icon) in the Account Management toolbar.