Ways to Monitor AWS Free Tier Usage with AWS Free Tier API

• Always free offers allow customers to use a service for free up to specified limits as long as they are AWS customers.
• 12-month free offers allow customers to use a service for free up to specified limits for one year from the date the account was activated.
• Short-term trials are free to use for a specified period or up to a one-time limit, depending on the service.

• The usage alerts in the Billing preferences of the AWS Billing and Cost Management console can send you emails when you exceed 85 percent of the Free Tier limit for each service.
• You can create a zero-spend or a monthly-cost budget in the Budgets section of the Billing and Cost Management console.
• The Free Tier page in the Billing and Cost Management console tells you the service, the type of offer, the current usage, and the forecasted usage for each offer in the current billing period.

Check Free Tier Usage from AWS CLI

• Install and Configure the Latest AWS CLI
• To check for free tier usage we can call GetFreeTierUsage API by typing the following command

• It will then show all the free tier usage information that applies to your account like this.

• To get usage of a specific service, you can type like this

• It will then return usage information of AWS Lambda service

• To check for an actual usage amount that is greater than the limit, you can type like this.

• It will return all the usage information if which actual usage amount is greater than the limit.
• To return output in a specific response format, you can type like this

• It will return a response that returns the response format according to the format we provided our query.

Daily Email Usage Report Notification

In this use case, we will create a usage report notification that will notify our Lambda usage daily every day at 11:00 AM UTC or 06:00 PM GMT+7.

• To send Daily Email Usage Report Notifications we will utilize several AWS Services like Amazon SNS, Amazon Lambda, Amazon EventBridge Scheduler, and Amazon SNS.
• We will build our infrastructure using AWS CDK.
• First, create our project folder.

• Start initializing our CDK Project.

• create index.mjs inside src folder

• Start typing the following code into src/index.mjs

• Go to lib/cdk-scheduled-reporting-stack.js
• Type the following code

• Then start deploying our stack with your own email address

• CDK will then output something like this, take note of the function name.

• Make sure you confirm your SNS Topic subscriptions first from your email account.

• You can test your lambda function CdkScheduledResportingSta-UsageReportFunction40879-IjQDqOovyRy4 like this

• After running the above command, you will receive your sales notification in your email like this.

• By receiving the above email, that means our service is deployed and working perfectly. You will receive a notification similar to the above example every day at 11:00 AM UTC or 06:00 PM GMT+7.

Build your own Free Tier Usage Dashboard

In this use case we will utilize Free Tier API to build our own Dashboard that integrate into our own application.

• To solve this use case, we will utilize AWS Lambda with Function URL enabled.
• We will use AWS CDK to build our infrastructure.
• First, create our project folder name free-tier-backend-api.

• Then initialize our CDK project using the following command.

• Then create our lambda function handler inside src/index.mjs with the following code.

• Then go to `lib/freetier-backend-api-stack.js to start creating our stack by typing the following code.

• After that, we can start deploying our infrastructure by typing this command into our terminal.

• After our deployment is completed, CDK will output our function URL like this https://vzthe2pe7kloemnpoyxwrdej7i0hmwps.lambda-url.ap-southeast-1.on.aws/ (take note of this).

• You can try testing our function URL whether it can return our data like this.

• Then we can start integrating it into our own web by typing this code into our HTML file, for example like this.

• The html file will output something like this.

• If the output is correct, that means we successfully integrated Free Tier Usage API into our own dashboard.

Stop EC2 Instance based on Free Tier Usage

Conclusions

References