How I Troubleshoot When AWS Budgets Don’t Send Alerts

Many cloud engineers set up AWS Budgets to keep spending under control. But what happens when the alerts stop showing up and your costs start rising quietly in the background?

It’s something I’ve faced before, and it taught me that tracking isn’t just about creating a budget, it’s about knowing how to respond when the system doesn’t behave as expected.

Here’s how I would approach troubleshooting “AWS Budgets alerts not triggering” if it happened to me.

1. Check the Budget Configuration

First thing first, look into the budget configuration. That’s the basics. Is something wrong there?

Go to AWS Budgets → Select your budget → Alerts tab and double-check the alert setup.
Make sure the thresholds and time periods are correct (for example, monthly vs. quarterly) and that the alert type matches your goal (Cost, Usage, or Reservation).
I’ve seen people set a usage alert while tracking spending, which never fires.

2. Verify SNS Subscription and Recipients

If everything is fine in the budget, move to SNS.

AWS Budgets use Amazon SNS (Simple Notification Service) to send alerts.

Go to SNS → Topics → Subscriptions and confirm that every email recipient shows a “Confirmed” status.
If someone never clicked the confirmation link, they won’t receive anything.
When in doubt, delete the subscription and resend the confirmation.

3. Review SNS Topic Permissions

Even with correct subscriptions, alerts can fail if AWS Budgets doesn’t have permission to publish messages.
In the SNS topic’s Access Policy, make sure there’s an entry like this:

Without that, AWS Budgets simply can’t send notifications.

4. Validate Alert Trigger Conditions

Do you know sometimes the alert isn’t broken , it just hasn’t triggered yet?

Check the Actual Cost or Usage against the Alert Threshold.
If the actual value hasn’t met the threshold, there’s nothing to alert.
You can test it by lowering the threshold temporarily (for example, set it to $1) and see if an alert fires.

5. Check IAM Permissions

Your IAM user or role must have the right permissions to create and manage budgets and SNS alerts.
At minimum, you need:
- budgets:*
- sns:Publish
If you’re using AWS Organizations, make sure policies at the management level don’t block budgets or notifications in member accounts.

6. Review Email and Monitoring Settings

Do you know sometimes, the alert did send, but you never saw it?

Check spam folders and any email filters that might automatically archive AWS messages. For programmatic monitoring
Open CloudWatch → Metrics → Billing to confirm cost data is being updated. If billing metrics lag, alerts can too.

7. Test and Recreate the Alert

If everything looks right but alerts still don’t arrive, recreate them.
Make a new SNS topic, link it to your budget, and test again. This rules out old or corrupted configurations between AWS Budgets and SNS.

Let’s summarize:

To troubleshoot “AWS Budgets alerts not triggering”:

Check the alert setup (thresholds, type, and period).
Confirm recipients are verified in SNS.
Review SNS topic permissions for budgets.amazonaws.com.
Compare actual cost vs. alert threshold — it might not have triggered yet.
Verify IAM permissions for budgets:* and sns:Publish.
Check spam folders or recreate the alert if all else fails.

AWS Budgets are a simple but powerful way to stay on top of costs when they work as expected. Once you understand how SNS, IAM, and thresholds tie together, troubleshooting gets much easier.

Cloud with DJ