Budgets
Budgets are a way of establishing spend limits for your clusters, namespaces, or labels. They can be created in moments using the Budgets dashboard.
Creating a budget
Begin by selecting the New Budget button in the top right corner of the dashboard. A new window will display from the right side of your screen.
![](https://docs.kubecost.com/~gitbook/image?url=https%3A%2F%2F1804196253-files.gitbook.io%2F%7E%2Ffiles%2Fv0%2Fb%2Fgitbook-x-prod.appspot.com%2Fo%2Fspaces%252FiPW99yDnU7U1FFgLgPOZ%252Fuploads%252Fgit-blob-294cf5f6318fb3ce07f056d0ea61a63714300954%252Fnew-budget.png%3Falt%3Dmedia&width=768&dpr=4&quality=100&sign=f95d285&sv=1)
Provide the following fields:
Budget name: The name of your budget
Budget cap: The allotted amount of your budget per interval
The currency of your budget is unchangeable in the Budgets dashboard. To change currency type, go to Settings > Currency. Then, select Save at the bottom of the Settings page to apply changes. Changing currency type will affect cost displays across all of your Kubecost, not just the Budgets dashboard. Kubecost does not convert spending costs to other currency types; it will only change the symbol displayed next to cost. For best results, configure your currency to what matches your spend.
Determine the length of your budget and reset date using the two dropdowns under the Budget cap text box. Budgets can be either Weekly or Monthly, and can reset on any day of the week/month. This means you don't need to recreate your budgets repeatedly and can align them with your schedules or processes.
Workloads
From the first dropdown, select whether this budget will apply to a namespace, cluster, or a label. In the second dropdown, choose the individual item in that category. When Namespace or Cluster has been selected, the dropdown menu should attempt to autocomplete by searching for all potential items.
Labels need to be provided in a key:value format that describes the object where the budget applies to.
Actions
Budget Actions are an optional method of better monitoring your budgets. You can use Actions to create an alert when your budget hits a certain percentage threshold, and send out an email, Slack, and/or Microsoft Teams alert.
Budget Actions by default check against the limits every 8 hours.
To begin, select New Action. Select your Trigger percentage value (leaving your Trigger percentage at 100 will only alert you once the budget has been exceeded). Then, provide any emails or webhooks where you would like to receive your alerts. Select Save.
If you are interested in implementing additional alerts to monitor further spending or Kubecost health, read our Alerts doc.
Finalize your budget by selecting Save. Your budget has been created and should appear on the dashboard.
Budget options
Once your budget has been created, it will immediately display your current spending. There are multiple ways of inspecting or adjusting your existing budgets.
Details
Selecting Details in the row of a specific budget will open a window displaying all details for your budget, including current spending, budget remaining, reset date, and any existing Actions.
You can also select View detailed breakdown to display an Allocations query for your budgeted item, or Download Budget Report to download your budget as a PDF file.
Editing a budget
Selecting Edit in the row of a specific budget will open a window allowing you to edit all details about your budget, similar to when you initially created it. All details are able to be changed here.
Deleting a budget
Selecting Delete will open the Delete Budget window. Confirm by selecting Delete.
Use cases
Enforce Kubecost Budgets to prevent overruns before they occur.
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