This guide walks you through the specifications of Wave's budget overage notification feature. When budget notifications are enabled, you will receive an alert when your cloud usage charges exceed the configured budget.

In Wave, click Usage Reports in the left menu, then click the alert icon in the top right corner to configure your budget.

Budget settings can only be configured at the individual account level:

Notes For day-over-day change, enter the excess percentage — not the total. For example, if you want to be notified when charges increase by 30% over the previous day, enter 30%, not 130%.

Wave retrieves cost data from each cloud provider whenever it is updated, checks against the configured threshold, and sends a notification if an overage is detected.

Data sources used:

Due to how each provider delivers data, there is typically a 1–2 day lag between when usage occurs and when it is reflected in Wave. The overage check runs after the data is reflected, which causes this delay.

Example: A notification for January 4th usage would typically be sent around January 5th or 6th.

Cloud provider cost data may include updates for multiple days at once. Even if multiple days show an overage, Wave will only send one notification.

Example: If on January 4th, usage data for January 1st and 2nd is updated and both exceed the budget, only one overage notification will be sent.

Wave reflects usage data in near real time and checks for budget overages each time provider data is updated. However, if the detection process runs past midnight due to data volume, it may conflict with the once-per-day notification rule, resulting in a missed notification.

The overage detection process runs in this order:

Example: If January 2nd usage data is updated around 5:00 PM on January 4th and the recalculation process runs past midnight, and the next day's CUR update causes January 3rd to also exceed the budget, only the January 3rd overage notification will be sent.

Wave checks for budget overages within a 3-day window from the current date. If data older than 3 days is updated and an overage is detected at that point, no notification will be sent.

Example: If a daily budget of $10 is set and January 1st usage was $8 through January 3rd, but a data update on January 4th pushes January 1st usage above $10, no overage notification will be sent.

If any errors occur during the process or if you have any questions, please reach out to us: