Cost management (expenditure alerts) in the Oracle Cloud

Background
As an Oracle Cloud user using it for my own purposes (mostly just testing), I'm very careful to always shut down services when not required so I don't incur unnecessary charges. However, I'm always just a little bit worried that I still might accidentally leave something running and hence incur a large charge at the end of the month. I don't want any "surprises" from Oracle on my credit card! If I was using the Oracle Cloud for my business, regardless of my monthly spend, I'd have the same concerns. Unexpected costs aren't going to make anyone happy regardless of the scale of your normal monthly spend. With AWS it's pretty easy to setup a price alert to warn you when a pre-defined threshold has been reached. Fortunately Oracle has introduced the same thing. On the Oracle Cloud it's just a little bit harder to find, but is actually quite easy to put in place. This article will explain the simple steps required to implement.Implementation steps
First, log into your Oracle Cloud account and navigate to your Dashboard. If you haven't already done so, choose the large blue " Customize Dashboard" box and add some "Classic" services such as "Database" (which by itself implies "Classic") or "Compute Classic":






Viewing your expense breakdown
Finally, if you want to see a quick breakdown of your costs to date, the process again is pretty simple. From your dashboard, actually click on your " month to date usage" dollar amount - the dollar amount shown is actually a link:

Hope this quick tip helps and gives reassurance that you can control/limit your monthly costs on the Oracle Cloud.