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I lead a small research team with 5 IAM users attached to a single AWS account; they use several EC2 instances for research work (including creating new instances as needed). My budget and my knowledge of AWS administration are both meager.

Dealing with multiple users and multiple instances, I'm finding it surprisingly elusive to come up with an easy, idiot-proof way to either (a) get a daily email of total usage or cost or (b) emailed alerts for instances left on by mistake. For the latter I've tried per-instance CloudWatch alarms for the latter checking for {CPU utilization < 5% for 1 hour} but those return INSUFFICIENT_DATA, and moreover don't cover newly created instances, which can allow new instances to rack up costs hidden from view.

I'd settle for a daily email saying "You've used a total of $xx in the last day", using human intelligence to figure out whether this amount is expected or not. But this seems to only be an option for when I exceed a monthly budget, whereas I want a day-based granularity. I'd prefer to avoid third-party services since they seem to come with their own costs and complexities.

Any suggestions?

One possible method you could use to monitor and alert on your AWS spending, is to utilize billing alarms for your estimated charges. This way, if a resource is created which will put you over your budget for the month, or your current level of spending is unsustainable at your current budget, you will receive an alert.

More information about this here:
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitoring/monitor_estimated_charges_with_cloudwatch.html