A startup's finance lead wants an email warning the moment the month's cloud spend reaches 80 percent of an agreed limit, and wants an earlier warning if the forecast says the limit will be exceeded. Which feature should be configured?
Show answer and explanation
Answer: B
Cloud Billing budgets let you set a monthly amount, scope it to projects, services or labels, and define threshold rules at percentages of that amount. Rules can trigger on actual or forecasted spend, and notifications go to billing admins by email or to a Pub/Sub topic for automation. Labels only tag resources for reporting, billing export stores detailed cost records in BigQuery for analysis, and committed use discounts lower prices without generating any alerts.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Resource labels attach key-value metadata so costs can be grouped in reports. They do not compare spending against a limit or send any notification on their own.
- C. Committed use discounts lower the price of Compute Engine usage in exchange for a one-year or three-year commitment. They reduce cost but do not monitor spend or raise alerts.
- D. Billing export to BigQuery writes detailed cost records to a dataset for custom analysis. Analysts can query it, but the export has no threshold logic and sends no warnings.