Understanding Project Budget Controls

Effective budget management is essential for controlling your GCP cloud resource costs. Project budgets are set by admins to help control cloud resource costs to ensure the team can access necessary resources while preventing unexpected cost overruns that could impact the tenant. (Click here for more details on how admins can setup budgets)

Budget Monitoring & Alerts

As you use resources within your project, the system tracks your consumption against your allocated budget. You'll receive automatic notifications at these key thresholds:

80% consumption: Early warning to review your usage
90% consumption: Time to consider reaching out to your admin
95% consumption: Action required - You are almost at the budget limit mark
100% consumption: Action required - budget limit reached

These alerts help you take timely action before facing potential service disruptions. You will be able to view the remaining budget for your respective projects in the My Projects page on the project card or its detailed view page as shown below:

Types of Budgets

Soft Budgets

Soft budgets provide spending visibility and notifications without automatic service disruption. With a soft budget:

You'll receive notifications when your consumption reaches 80%, 90%, 95%, and 100% of your allocated budget
Your services will continue to run even after exceeding your budget
You'll be prompted to contact your administrator about increasing your budget or reducing resource usage

Soft budgets are ideal for projects where service continuity is critical, but cost awareness is still important.

Hard Budgets (Coming Soon)

Hard budgets enforce strict spending limits for select services. With a hard budget:

You'll receive the same notifications at 80%, 90%, 95%, and 100% consumption milestones
When you reach 100% of your budget, compute services of affected projects will automatically be suspended
To resume these services, you'll need to work with your admin to extend the budget or implement other solutions like license purchase, etc.

Hard budgets are perfect for controlling costs in non-critical environments or for specific resource-intensive services where unexpected overruns could lead to significant charges.

Responding to Budget Alerts

If you receive a budget alert, consider these options:

Contact Your Admin: Reach out to request a budget increase if necessary
Optimize Resources: Review your usage and scale down unnecessary resources
Prioritize Services: For soft budgets, decide which services are most critical to maintain
Project Planning: Consider how to distribute workloads across projects with available budget

Remember that with hard budgets, select compute services will automatically stop when you reach 100% of your budget until your admin takes action.

Best Practices

As a project user, you can take several actions to effectively manage your project budget:

Monitor regularly: Check your consumption through the My Projects dashboard before receiving alerts
Plan resource usage: Schedule resource-intensive activities around your budget cycle
Act early: Contact your admin when approaching 80% rather than waiting for critical alerts
Document needs: When requesting budget increases, clearly explain how additional resources support project objectives
Optimize resources: Identify and scale down underutilized services to extend your budget
Understand your limits (Coming Soon): Know your budget type (soft/hard) and amount at project initiation
Prioritize effectively: Determine which workloads are most critical if you need to reduce usage
Know your contacts: Identify which admins can adjust your budget before you need assistance
Review consumption patterns: Analyze which services consume the most budget to target optimizations
Suggest alternatives: When requesting changes, propose resource optimizations that could help control costs

By understanding how project budgets work and monitoring your consumption, you can help ensure your important services remain available while maintaining appropriate cost controls.