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4. Cost monitoring

You'll complete a short day-zero cost path right after infra: see spend in the account console, optionally add dashboards in a workspace, tag workloads, and set budgets.

Prereqs: Infra setup

Set this up before you have anything to monitor​

Turn on cost visibility now, while the account is small. Teams that wait pay for it twice: a surprise invoice when usage scales past whoever was supposed to be watching, and an awkward silence when finance asks who spent what and nobody can say. Both go away if consumption is already visible when you have a handful of workspaces and known owners.

The other reason to do it early is tags. They only apply to usage created after you set them, so every week you wait is a week of spend you can never attribute. Retrofitting attribution is not a thing.

How to think about system tables​

System tables are read-only billing and operations tables in the system catalog, for example system.billing.usage and system.billing.list_prices. Every dashboard you import and every cost query you write later reads from them. You do not need to learn the schema on day zero. You need to know these tables are the source of truth for consumption and list-price dollars, and everything else in this section is a view on top of them.

For depth, use the official references:

Journey checklist​

StepTopicWhy this slot
1Import usage dashboardFastest visibility, straight from the account console, no SQL.
2Additional dashboardsOptional packaged dashboards on your catalog and schema.
3Tags and attributionForward-only labels for team and project rollups.
4Budget alertsAccount-level monthly monitors with email.

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