Cloud cost dashboard with tagging rules and budget alerts

Brightwave Labs runs its product on AWS. Over eight months the monthly bill went from $18,000 to $47,000, and nobody can say which team or feature caused the rise. Finance asks engineering, engineering shrugs, and the bill keeps climbing. Two things make it worse: about 30% of resources have no owner tag, and a few test databases were left running for weeks.

The finance lead wants three things she can act on. She wants the bill split by team and by service, so she knows who to talk to. She wants a list of waste, meaning untagged resources and resources that look idle. And she wants an alert when a team is on track to go over its monthly budget, not a surprise on the first of the month.

You will work from the AWS Cost and Usage Report format, using a synthetic export you generate to match its columns, because real billing data is sensitive. Your dashboard reads that export, applies a set of tagging rules to decide ownership, and computes cost by team, by service and by day. It flags untagged spend and idle-looking resources, and it runs a simple forecast that fires an alert when a team's projected month-end cost is over its budget. Done looks like a small web dashboard plus a nightly script, a waste report that names specific resources, and an alert that would have caught the test-database leak at least a week earlier. The finance lead signs off when she can answer "which team spent this" for at least 90% of the bill.