Amazon Web Services charge its customers on a pay-as-you-go model considering hours or storage used or data transferred utilized  AWS products. If you are using AWS services continuously, it is very important to monitor the charges of your account. Amazon CloudWatch enables monitoring your charges as well as allows you to set billing alerts for specified amounts.

If you are using AWS Consolidated billing, the AWS payee / master account can set billing alerts for total billing. The child account cannot set individual billing alerts for their usage. Payee account can set billing alerts for one of the linked accounts. Previously we showed how to set a new billing alert for a specified amount. This guide will show you how to view, modify or delete the existing billing alerts.

Login to your AWS account console and follow the next steps -

1. Go to the AWS CloudWatch Console.

2. Once logged in to the CloudWatch dashboard, click “Billing Alarms” for a list with the existing billing alarms.

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3. As highlighted above, currently the AWS console show US-West regions. As per AWS account we can set CloudWatch billing alarms in the US-East region only. Click “Close” and change the region to “US-East”.

4. Once selected you will see the existing billing alarms list set in the selected AWS cloud region, for that specific example, US East (N. Virginia) region.

5. Select an alarm to view its details. It will show its current state, description, threshold value and the related action configured.

6. Select the tab “Metric” to list the metrics of the alarm. Here it shows that the current alarm is set to the “EstimatedCharges” metric with dimension (unit) being “Currency”. The statistics and period selected by AWS are set by default during the alarm creation.

7. The CloudWatch alarm’s “History” , shows the a log of past CloudWatch alarms.

8. To change the alarm value, click “Modify”.

9. Update the threshold value as well as the description as required. We updated the estimated billing value from $5,000 to $4,500. Do not change the minutes as it is selected by AWS as default. Click “Continue”.

10. In the “Configure Actions” page, modify the email address and action if required. Click “Continue”.

11. Review all the details and click “Save Alarm” to save the changes.

12. AWS will confirm that the alarm was saved.

13. Go to the alarms page as shown in step #4 to see the updated alarm. To delete the updated alarm click “Delete”.

14. It will ask for a confirmation before deleting the alarm. Confirm by clicking “Yes, Delete”.

15. The alarm will be deleted immediately.

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Keywords: Amazon web services, Amazon AWS console, Amazon AWS instances, EC2 Service, Amazon cloud computing, Cloud Monitoring, AWS CloudWatch, CLI tools, CloudWatch Alarm, CloudWatch Alert, Cloud Watch, Performance, AWS Billing