Google announced the launch of a new way for businesses to keep track of their costs related to Google Cloud Platform and to avoid surprises on their bills. New Billing Alerts are available in beta to all Cloud Platform customers.

“On-demand computing and the efficiencies that come from being able to scale your compute resources up and down as your workload changes are part of the reason why running in the cloud is so appealing,” says product manager Dan Stokeley. “However, that flexibility can mean that you need to pay more attention to variability in costs.”

“Once you’ve set an alert on your account, the Billing Alerts feature will send email notifications to billing administrators when the charges for the current month exceed the threshold you’ve set,” he explains. “Notifications will also be sent as your costs approach the threshold. You can cancel the alert at any time in the Developers Console.”

To set up an alert, go to Developers Console, click the gear icon, select billing accounts, click the name of the account you want to set an alert for, and click alerts. From there, just enter a threshold amount (or edit an existing one) and hit set threshold.

You can still find more detailed cost monitoring in Billing Export, which provides a daily export of usage/cost estimates that you can import into other tools via JSON or CSV.

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