Learn how to monitor cloud spending, forecast costs, and configure budget alerts in VEXXHOST Public Cloud using APIs and CLI tools.
Pay-as-you-go cloud infrastructure makes it easier to launch a development environment, add capacity to an application, or test a new workload without committing to fixed resources. But flexibility creates a familiar question: how do you know what your infrastructure is costing before the invoice arrives?
An extra virtual machine may be needed for a few days. A storage volume may remain allocated after testing ends. A production workload may gradually consume more resources as traffic grows. Each decision affects the bill, and the reason for an increase is not always obvious from the monthly total.
VEXXHOST Public Cloud provides two complementary capabilities for managing this: Cost Explorer, which helps teams examine estimated resource spending and forecast costs, and Budgets, which sends notifications when spending reaches or is projected to reach defined thresholds.
Both are accessible through APIs and OpenStack command-line tools, so teams can incorporate cost visibility into existing infrastructure workflows.
Why Cloud Cost Visibility Matters
VEXXHOST Public Cloud is a self-service, pay-as-you-go platform. Customers can provision infrastructure as needed without a sales-led procurement process or long-term infrastructure commitment. Public Cloud pricing is published, but knowing the unit price of a resource is different from understanding what an evolving environment will cost over time.
A useful cost management process answers three questions:
- What are we spending? Review estimated costs over a chosen period.
- What is contributing to the total? Investigate the services and resources behind changes.
- When should we act? Get notified before spending moves too far beyond expectations.
Cost Explorer addresses the first two questions. Budgets addresses the third. Neither replaces decisions about capacity, application performance, or which resources are still needed.
For small engineering teams managing infrastructure alongside application development, having these signals in an existing workflow makes cost monitoring more practical without requiring a dedicated FinOps team.
Cost Explorer: Understand Where Cloud Spending Goes
Cost Explorer allows authorized users to request cost reports for their VEXXHOST Public Cloud projects. Rather than waiting until the end of the billing cycle, a team can examine estimated consumption across a chosen time range.
Investigate Spending by Service and Resource
Reports support hourly, daily, or monthly granularity, with grouping and filtering options for investigating costs by dimensions such as service, region, usage type, and resource.
The currently documented cost calculation scope includes:
- Compute instances: estimated charges associated with provisioned virtual machines.
- Block storage volumes: costs associated with allocated storage capacity.
- Images: costs associated with retained images.
- Object storage: costs associated with stored data.
Consider a team whose estimated spending rises after a release cycle. A service-level report could show whether compute or storage accounts for the change. More detailed reporting can then help engineers investigate the resources involved.
That increase may be justified: new customers, added redundancy, or a bigger test environment all have legitimate infrastructure costs. Cost Explorer provides evidence for the conversation; it does not label spending as wasteful.
Forecast Costs Based on Recent Usage
Historical reports explain what has happened. Cost forecasts help estimate what could happen if recent spending patterns continue.
Suppose a project averages $35 per day. At that rate, 30 days of similar usage would cost approximately $1,050. A team with a $900 monthly allowance can see the potential gap early and decide whether the forecast reflects expected growth or resources that should be reviewed.
Cost Explorer uses a trailing daily spending average with a configurable lookback period. Forecasts can cover a future horizon of up to 90 days.
These are projections, not guarantees. A forecast cannot anticipate a deployment scheduled for next week, a seasonal traffic spike, or the planned deletion of a test environment. It is most useful when interpreted alongside upcoming changes to the infrastructure.
Know What the Estimates Include
Estimated costs are not the same as a finalized invoice. The current calculation scope does not include every potentially billable Public Cloud item. Networking and other services may appear on the invoice without being represented in these reports. Taxes, account-specific adjustments, and credits can also affect the final amount. Recent usage may take time to appear.
For planning and investigation, use Cost Explorer. For the final amount owed, use the billing record.
Budgets: Set Spending Thresholds and Receive Alerts
A cost report only helps when someone checks it. Budgets adds a way to notify the responsible team when actual or forecast spending reaches a defined level.
A budget is associated with a project and can use daily, monthly, quarterly, yearly, or custom time periods. It can also be configured around selected services, regions, or usage types.
Actual Spending vs. Forecasted Spending
Imagine a development project with a $500 monthly budget. The team can set two thresholds:
- 80% of actual spending: send a warning once estimated spending reaches $400.
- 100% of forecasted spending: send a warning if the projected total for the budget period reaches $500, even if actual costs are still below that amount.
These alerts serve different purposes. An actual-spending alert tells the team what has already occurred. A forecast alert gives it a chance to investigate a possible overrun before the end of the period.
Thresholds can be delivered by email or HTTPS webhook. Email works for a budget owner; webhooks allow a team to route events into an existing monitoring, chat, or incident-management system. Any automated action after receiving a webhook must be implemented separately.
Budgets does not enforce a hard spending cap. Reaching a threshold does not stop virtual machines, remove storage, or block additional usage. Notifications help teams make decisions; they do not prevent charges.
How to Get Started with Cost Explorer and Budgets
These tools are currently designed for API and CLI access rather than a Cost Explorer or Budgets screen in the VEXXHOST Cloud Console. The examples below use the OpenStack CLI and the published VEXXHOST client packages.
Step 1: Prepare Your OpenStack CLI
Configure the OpenStack CLI with credentials scoped to the VEXXHOST Public Cloud project you want to monitor, using clouds.yaml or supported OS_* environment variables. Then install the extensions:
pip install vexxhost-costexplorerclient vexxhost-budgetclient
The clients use the existing OpenStack authentication session. Installing them does not grant additional project permissions. For installation and authentication details, see the published Cost Explorer client and Budgets client instructions.
Step 2: Request a Cost Report
This example requests a daily report for September 2026, grouped by service:
openstack --os-region-name ca-east-1 cost report create \
--start 2026-09-01 \
--end 2026-10-01 \
--granularity daily \
--group-by service \
--metric cost \
--detail
Replace the dates with your reporting period. The start date is inclusive and the end date is exclusive. Cost Explorer's current public API endpoint is discovered through the OpenStack service catalog in ca-east-1; this is an endpoint-selection setting, not necessarily the region where the resources being reported are located.
Use the results to identify a change, then narrow the report by service, usage type, or resource where supported. You can also request forecasts with openstack cost forecast create.
Step 3: Create a Monthly Budget
The Budget client looks for a budget service in the Keystone catalog. If that service is not listed yet, set its documented endpoint in your terminal before running the commands below:
export OS_BUDGET_ENDPOINT=https://budget.public.global.vexxhost.net
If your catalog already lists the budget service, no endpoint override is needed. This setting selects the Budget API; it does not change your existing OpenStack credentials or permissions.
First, create an email notification channel:
openstack budget channel create finance \
--type email \
--address finance@example.com
Replace the example address with the intended recipient. The recipient must confirm the email channel before notifications can be delivered.
Then create the $500 monthly budget with actual and forecast thresholds:
openstack budget create dev-monthly \
--amount 500 \
--period monthly \
--threshold name=warning,value=80,channel=finance \
--threshold name=forecast-limit,value=100,basis=forecasted,channel=finance
After setup, use openstack budget show dev-monthly to review its configuration and status. For other endpoint configuration options, see the Budgets client instructions.
Cost reports and alerts are not real-time billing controls. Allow for reporting delays and periodic budget evaluation rather than treating notifications as instantaneous safeguards.
Where These Tools Fit Into Day-to-Day Operations
Development and Testing
Engineering teams often create temporary instances or volumes during releases. Comparing daily spending before and after a test cycle can help reveal capacity that was left allocated. A development budget provides an additional warning if consumption rises unexpectedly.
Growing Production Applications
Increased compute and storage costs may reflect healthy application growth. Reports and forecasts help teams assess whether that growth is consistent with usage trends and whether capacity changes are needed. The goal is not to minimize spending at the expense of reliability.
Multiple Teams or Environments
Separate development and production projects can have separate budgets and owners. Cost Explorer and Budgets respect project-level access; a consolidated view across projects requires authorized aggregation or other integration rather than assuming that every user can see organization-wide spending.
Operational Automation
Webhook alerts can trigger a review workflow: notify the responsible team, retrieve a detailed cost report, identify relevant resources, and decide whether to retain, resize, or remove them. That keeps cost decisions connected to engineering context.
Five Practices That Make Cloud Spending Easier to Manage
- Review spending regularly. A weekly comparison can reveal gradual increases that a single threshold might not explain.
- Set an early-warning threshold. An alert at 70% or 80% of the planned amount leaves more room to investigate than an alert at 100%.
- Combine actual and forecast alerts. They answer different questions and provide a more useful view together.
- Check the full resource lifecycle. A stopped VM may still retain billable capacity, and allocated storage can continue to generate charges. Verify which resources must be deleted to end the relevant charges.
- Reconcile estimates with invoices. Confirm what is included in Cost Explorer before using its totals for finance reporting or cost comparisons.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I see my entire VEXXHOST Public Cloud bill in Cost Explorer?
Not necessarily. Cost Explorer currently estimates a defined set of compute and storage-related charges. The final invoice may include other billable services and account adjustments.
Will a budget alert stop my infrastructure from running?
No. Budgets sends notifications; it does not automatically suspend resources or prevent further spending.
Can I use the tools without the Cloud Console?
Yes. Cost Explorer and Budgets are available through APIs, Python clients, and OpenStack CLI extensions. They can be incorporated into an existing engineering workflow.
Make Cost Visibility Part of Your Cloud Workflow
Pay-as-you-go infrastructure is useful because capacity can change with the needs of an application. Spending should be just as easy to investigate as resource usage.
With Cost Explorer, VEXXHOST Public Cloud customers can review estimated costs and make informed forecasts. With Budgets, they can receive notifications when spending approaches a defined amount or is projected to exceed it. Together, these tools help teams connect cloud consumption to day-to-day decisions without adding a manual approval step to every deployment.
Already using VEXXHOST Public Cloud? Start with the Cost Explorer CLI guide and Budgets CLI guide to add reporting and alerts to your workflow.
Ready to try VEXXHOST Public Cloud? Create your cloud account to begin the self-service signup process, review pay-as-you-go pricing, and start deploying once your account is activated. No sales call or long-term infrastructure contract is required.
