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Set Budgets and Alerts

Visibility tells you what happened; budgets and alerts tell you before something goes wrong. KOSTRA lets you set spending expectations against your pool structure and be notified when reality diverges — whether that is a budget breach or an unusual spike. This guide shows how to put those guardrails in place.

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Set expectations against pools

Budgets in KOSTRA are most useful when they sit on the pool structure you have already built. A budget on a team’s pool makes that team’s spend accountable against a number they agreed to, and it gives finance an early signal when a pool is trending over.
  1. Make sure your Pools reflect the teams and projects you want to budget — see Organize Spend with Pools.
  2. Open the relevant pool.
  3. Set the budget or spending constraint for the pool.
  4. Save it so KOSTRA can track actual spend against the expectation.
Because pools are hierarchical, a budget on a parent pool covers everything beneath it, while budgets on child pools give you finer-grained control.

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Add constraints and quotas

Beyond a headline budget, KOSTRA supports constraints that keep individual resources and pools within policy — for example, limits that flag when spend or resource lifetime exceeds what you intend. Use these to catch the small, recurring leaks that erode a budget over time, such as resources left running past their useful life.
  1. In the left navigation, open Quotas and Budgets.
  2. Define the constraint you want to enforce.
  3. Scope it to the pool or resources it should apply to.
  4. Save it.

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Detect anomalies automatically

Not every problem fits a fixed threshold. A sudden change in spend — a service that jumps well above its normal pattern — is often the first sign of a misconfiguration or a runaway workload. KOSTRA’s anomaly detection watches for these deviations so you do not have to.
  1. In the left navigation, open Anomalies.
  2. Create an anomaly-detection policy for the spend you want to watch.
  3. Set the sensitivity and scope appropriate to that spend.
  4. Save the policy.
When KOSTRA detects a deviation, it surfaces the anomaly so you can investigate while the cost is still small.

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Get notified

Guardrails are only useful if the right people hear about them. KOSTRA sends email notifications for budget and alert events, so a pool owner learns about a breach or an anomaly without having to watch a dashboard. Confirm that notification email is configured for your instance and that pool owners are set, so alerts reach the person who can act.

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A practical guardrail setup

  1. Budget each significant pool against an agreed number.
  2. Add constraints for the leaks you know you have — idle resources, forgotten test environments.
  3. Turn on anomaly detection for your largest or most volatile spend.
  4. Make sure owners receive notifications.
With these in place, cost management shifts from monthly firefighting to steady, early intervention.