To help Principal Investigators protect their funding, the FinOps toolkit provides tools to establish proactive safeguards and prevent budget overruns.
Setting Up Alerts and Warnings
You can configure custom budget limits using either formally allocated budgets or temporary spending caps (for example, capping spend for a specific one-week development sprint).
Alerts can be targeted broadly to an entire account, or narrowed down to specific services, cost tags, or combinations of both (e.g., setting an alert specifically for EC2 usage by a single user within a specific project). PIs can configure up to 10 thresholds per alert, allowing you to receive escalating warnings when you hit 50%, 75%, 90%, and 100% of your limit. Currently, these notifications are sent via email, with additional communication channels planned for the future.
Anomaly Detection
Beyond simple threshold alerts, the toolkit actively monitors your environment for unusual spending patterns. This includes sudden spikes in usage, expensive services that were accidentally left running overnight, and configuration changes that artificially inflate your costs.
Access Controls and Resource Restrictions
When budget limits are exceeded, the system can deploy both automated and manual access restrictions to stop further spending. These restrictions can block access to project‑tagged resources, lock out specific users, or shut down shared resources.
In situations where automation cannot successfully enforce a restriction, the operations team receives an automated notification to step in and implement the blocks manually.
Important: FinOps highly encourages PIs to configure these access controls carefully. Setting overly aggressive automatic blocks can unintentionally disrupt critical scientific work mid-process. We recommend working with the FinOps team to design a safe strategy.