Budget Groups
This page explains how to set, monitor, and get alerts for spending using Budget Groups.
Overview
Budget Groups let you track and control spend for groups of services, warehouses, users, or other billable entities. They provide clear financial visibility and timely alerts when spend approaches or exceeds your targets.
What You Can Budget For
You can define budgets for most services whose costs change frequently, including:
Cloud Services such as:
Auto-clustering
Pipes / Snowpipes
AI Services
Query Acceleration
Specific warehouses or groups of warehouses
Users
Jobs & Workflows
Budget Groups support both broad scopes (e.g., all auto-clustering costs) and narrow scopes (e.g., a single critical warehouse).
How Budget Groups Work
Budget Groups function as spend guardrails, continuously tracking the cost of selected services or warehouses within a defined time window. Instead of discovering overruns at the end of the month, they provide early, actionable signals when spend begins to drift beyond expectations.
Each Budget Group is built around three core components:
Scope – which services, warehouses, users, or workflows are being monitored
Time window – how often the budget resets (daily, weekly, or monthly)
Budget amount – the maximum dollar value you expect to spend in that window
After defining the budget amount, you configure percentage-based alert thresholds. For example, you may choose to be notified at:
50% of the budget
90% of the budget
100% of the budget
As costs accumulate, the platform calculates progress toward the budget and triggers alerts immediately when a threshold percentage is crossed.
This creates clear value:
Prevent unexpected spikes by catching unusual spend early
Align engineering and FinOps teams around shared expectations
Support operational tuning through consistent visibility
Create accountability by assigning ownership for specific cost areas
In practice, Budget Groups operate as an early-warning system, helping teams react before spend exceeds planned levels.
How to Create a Budget Group
Follow these steps in the platform to create a new Budget Group:
Go to Monitoring → Budget groups.
Click Create Budget Group.
Select the scope of services, warehouses, users, or workflows.
Choose a time window (Daily, Weekly, Monthly).
Define the budget amount in dollars based on historical spend.
Assign an owner.
Configure alert thresholds in percentages, such as 50%, 90%, or 100%.
Select where alerts should be sent, predefined channels or a specific email. (how to create channels in Seemore )
Save the Budget Group.
Tracking Budget Group
To monitor the performance of an existing Budget Group:
Go to Monitoring → Budget Groups, to see the list of Budget Groups created.
Select the Budget Group you want to track.
Click on it to open the detailed view.
Inside the group’s page, you can see:
The budget amount
Current accumulated spend
Progress toward each threshold
Whether any alerts have been triggered
This view helps you understand how the group is trending and whether intervention is needed. In the main page you are able to filter the list by the budget period defined (all, daily, weekly and monthly)
Notifications
When setting up a Budget Group, you choose where alerts should be delivered. You can use any of the Channels defined in the platform:
Slack channel
Microsoft Teams channel
Email group
You can also send alerts directly to a specific email address without using a predefined channel.
Alerts are sent automatically whenever a configured percentage threshold is crossed.
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