Rather than checking a dashboard manually, you can set up a Monitor that watches a cost metric continuously and notifies you the moment it crosses a threshold you define.
- Go to Observability > Monitors in the Dashboard and click New Monitor.
- Set Category to Infrastructure.
- Choose a Cost metric as the trigger, and set the threshold value that should fire the alert (for example, total cost exceeding a dollar amount within a given interval).
- Attach a Notifier — email, Slack, or webhook — so your team is actually notified when the monitor fires. If you don't already have a notifier configured, you can create one from the same Monitors area first.
- Save the monitor. It runs continuously in the background and raises an alert through your configured notifier whenever the cost threshold is crossed.
In summary: set your organization's monthly ceiling under Dashboard > Settings > Billing, use Boards or the Analytics API to keep an eye on spending patterns day to day, and layer a cost Monitor on top so you're notified automatically the moment spend crosses a threshold, instead of finding out after the fact.
