Azure Cost Budget Integration

Azure Cost Management budgets let you define spending thresholds for your subscription or billing account and get notified automatically when those thresholds are crossed. This integration routes those budget alerts to ITOC360 so your team is aware of unexpected cost spikes before they become a problem at the end of the month.

How it works

You create a budget in Azure Cost Management and configure alert conditions — for example, notify when actual spending reaches 80% or 100% of the budget. When the threshold is breached, Azure fires a webhook to ITOC360 via an Action Group. The platform parses the payload and creates an alert with the budget name, spent amount, and threshold clearly visible in the alert title.

Budget alerts are one-directional — Azure fires a notification when a threshold is crossed, but there is no automatic resolution. Each alert in ITOC360 will need to be acknowledged or closed manually once the situation is addressed.

Prerequisites

• An active Azure subscription or billing account

• Your ITOC360 webhook URL and integration token

• An Action Group configured with your ITOC360 webhook URL (see the Action Group setup section below)

Part 1 — Set up an Action Group

Before creating the budget, make sure you have an Action Group that points to your ITOC360 endpoint. If you already created one for another Azure integration, you can reuse it — skip to Part 2.

Go to Azure Portal → Monitor → Action Groups and click + Create.

On the Basics tab:

• Action group name — e.g. itoc360

• Display name — e.g. itoc360

• Region — choose the region closest to you

On the Actions tab, set the action type to Webhook, give it a name, and paste your itoc360 webhook URL in the URI field:

https://<your-url>/functions/v1/events?token=<x-itoc360-token>

Set Enable the common alert schema to Yes — this is required. Click OK, then Review + create → Create.

Part 2 — Create a budget

Go to Azure Portal → Cost Management + Billing → Cost Management → Budgets and click + Add.

Step 1 — Create a budget

On the Create a budget tab, fill in the budget details:

• Name — give your budget a descriptive name, e.g. itoc360-monthly-budget

• Reset period — Monthly is the most common choice

• Creation date — when the budget starts tracking

• Expiration date — set this at least a year out

• Amount — your monthly spending limit in your billing currency

Click Next > to move to the alerts configuration.

Step 2 — Set alert conditions

On the Set alerts tab, configure when you want to be notified:

Under Alert conditions, click the row to add a threshold:

• Type — choose Actual to alert when real spending crosses the threshold, or Forecasted to alert based on projected spend

• % of budget — enter the threshold percentage, e.g. 80 for an early warning or 100 for when the budget is fully consumed

You can add multiple rows to get notified at different thresholds — for example, one at 80% forecasted and another at 100% actual.

Under Alert recipients (email), enter at least one email address. This is required by Azure even if you're using an Action Group for the webhook notification.

Click Create to save the budget.

Step 3 — Connect the Action Group to a budget alert rule

Azure's budget creation wizard doesn't expose Action Group selection for billing-account-scoped budgets. To connect your ITOC360 webhook, you need to create an alert rule through Azure Monitor that targets your budget.

Go to Azure Portal → Monitor → Alerts → + Create → Alert rule:

1. Scope → select your subscription

2. Condition → select Cost Management signals, choose your budget

3. Actions → select your itoc360 Action Group

4. Details → name the rule budget-alert-oncall

5. Review + create → Create

From this point on, whenever your budget threshold is crossed, Azure will fire a webhook to ITOC360 automatically.

Field mappings

Azure Cost Budget alerts are delivered using the Common Alert Schema with a monitoringService of CostAlerts. The platform reads the following fields:

Azure Field	Platform Field
data.alertContext.AlertData.BudgetName + data.essentials.alertId	Fingerprint — ties together events for the same budget
data.alertContext.AlertData.ThresholdType	Priority
data.alertContext.AlertData.BudgetName	Alert title (budget name)
data.alertContext.AlertData.SpentAmount	Alert title (current spend)
data.alertContext.AlertData.BudgetThreshold	Alert title (threshold)

Threshold type to priority mapping

Azure Threshold Type	Platform Priority
Actual	HIGH
Forecasted	MEDIUM

Actual spend alerts are treated as HIGH because the threshold has already been crossed. Forecasted alerts are MEDIUM since they represent a projected overage that can still be addressed before it happens.

Notes

Budget alerts do not resolve automatically. Once a budget alert fires, the corresponding alert in ITOC360 will remain open until it is manually acknowledged or closed.

For better coverage, consider setting up multiple alert conditions on the same budget — for example, a Forecasted alert at 80% as an early warning and an Actual alert at 100% as a final notification. Each threshold triggers a separate webhook and creates a separate alert in ITOC360.

Budgets reset according to the reset period you configured. After a monthly reset, the spending counter starts fresh and previous alerts are no longer relevant — make sure to close any open budget alerts in ITOC360 at the start of a new period.