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Runbook: TeamBudgetWarning / TeamBudgetExceeded

Alert: TeamBudgetWarning (>80 % budget consumed) or TeamBudgetExceeded (>100 %)
Severity: Warning / Critical
Category: finops

What is happening

The tech-insights-exporter CronJob queries the OpenCost API every 15 minutes and pushes idp_team_actual_cost_usd_monthly{team} to Pushgateway. This alert fires when that value exceeds the configured threshold in idp_team_budget_usd_monthly{team}.

Immediate triage

# Which teams are over budget?
kubectl exec -n monitoring deploy/prometheus-operator -c prometheus -- \
  curl -s localhost:9090/api/v1/query \
  --data-urlencode 'query=idp_team_budget_utilization_ratio > 0.8' | jq '.data.result'

# What's running in the team's namespace?
kubectl top pods -n services-dev --sort-by=memory
kubectl top pods -n services     --sort-by=memory

# Check OpenCost breakdown for the team
open http://opencost.idp.local

Remediation steps

  1. Identify the biggest spenders — sort OpenCost by namespace → drill into workload.
  2. Scale down non-critical workloads — reduce replicas or apply a HPA max ceiling: 
    kubectl scale deployment <name> -n services-dev --replicas=1
  3. Right-size resource requests — over-provisioned requests inflate cost allocation: 
    kubectl set resources deployment/<name> -n services-dev \
  --requests=cpu=100m,memory=128Mi --limits=cpu=500m,memory=512Mi
  4. Update the team budget — if the current budget is too low, raise it:
    • Edit the team's entry in catalog.teamMetadata (backstage/app-config.yaml). idpGithubOrgTeamMetadataModule merges this onto the GitHub-Org-synced Group entity's idp.io/cost-budget-monthly-usd annotation on the next catalog sync — editing the annotation directly on an entity has no lasting effect, since Groups are no longer hand-written YAML (see ADR-0004).
    • Update the matching entry in kubernetes/finops/team-budgets-configmap.yaml.
    • The new value will take effect on the next exporter run (≤15 minutes).

How budgets are set

Budgets live in two authoritative locations (keep in sync): - Backstage catalog — catalog.teamMetadata in backstage/app-config.yaml, merged onto each GitHub-Org-synced Group entity's idp.io/cost-budget-monthly-usd annotation at sync time. - Kubernetes ConfigMap — kubernetes/finops/team-budgets-configmap.yaml (data.budgets.json) read by the exporter via TEAM_BUDGETS_JSON env var.

Defaults (USD/month): platform-team $2000, ml-team $1500, backend-team $600, data-team $800, frontend-team $400, android-team $300, ios-team $300, qa-platform-team $200.