Catching Kubernetes Cloud Cost Overruns Early with OpenCost and Prometheus Alerts
A monthly cloud invoice landing 40% over forecast often reveals only that spending was too high, not which team or workload caused it. Cloud billing consoles don't map to Kubernetes namespaces, and billing data typically arrives 6 to 24 hours late, so runaway workloads can consume days of budget unnoticed. The article proposes deploying OpenCost, a CNCF project, which estimates per-namespace costs from resource allocations and exports them as Prometheus metrics at scrape-interval resolution. It then describes building recording rules to convert allocations into hourly dollar figures and setting PrometheusRule alerts to fire during the month. On OpenShift, the walkthrough notes that user workload monitoring must be enabled so custom ServiceMonitor and PrometheusRule objects are picked up.
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