Monitoring with Alerts, Notifications, and Reports

Now you have selected the necessary tags and enforced a tagging strategy for your workloads on AWS. In this section, you will now look at how to use these tagging mechanisms to generate simple billing alerts, notifications, and reports using AWS tools and services.

First, you will learn how to create a fairly simple billing alarm using Amazon CloudWatch. But before that, there are a few prerequisite steps that you need to complete, starting with enabling billing alerts.

Enabling Billing Alerts

Before you go ahead and create billing alarms using Amazon CloudWatch, first enable billing alerts using the AWS Billing console by following these steps:

1. Sign in to the AWS Management Console and launch the AWS Billing dashboard using the following link: https://packt.link/BeKTf.
2. Next, select the Billing Preferences option from the navigation pane on the left.
3. Click on the checkbox next to the Receive billing alerts...